PW2 Transparency issues

Hi all. I seem to be having a problem. I've modelled a glas display case as a part and I've modelled the scene the case is to go in as a part. Started a new assembly and imported the scene part and the case part.... simple. Now, I've used PW2 to replicate the lighting conditions in the overall assembly, but as far as the lighting preview window is concerned, the transparent glass pieces are not transparent at all. If you do the same thing back in the PART, it has no troubles. I'm trying to use a spotlight inside the case so that it highlights the case contents and the light radiaes outwards, however it makes NO difference because as far as the lighting is concerned, the glass case is not transparent. In the final rendering the case looks transparent again but as far as the lighting goes, no light seems to penetrate the case...... is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

george.

Reply to
George Maddever
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I've tried further and it doesn't seem to (as far as the lights go) recognise the transparency of a part feature in an assembly..... grrrr :(

Reply to
George Maddever

Got it I think...... damn global settings wer overriding a local stting methinks :)

Reply to
George Maddever

George, If you go here...

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I actually did something similar (alien head) to what you are doing.

One thing I noticed is that ANY time you make an adjustment to lighting settings, you have to do a CTRL-Q to get it to update.

Also, whenenver you are dealing with transparent objects, it's always a good idea to enable "Transparent" under your Global Shadow Control and do a test rendering to see if things improve. If you don't have any transparent objects, don't enable it because it could slow things down with no difference in the final image.

One thing that I find strange is that you get different affects if you have the sliders all the way to the left as apposed to having the first slider (Edges) moved one notch to the right.

When you do that, the Edge Quality slider becomes active, so be sure and experiment a little there.

There are so many settings in PW2 and just one *tiny* little adjustment can throw the entire rendering off in a gigantic way! It's so hard to help people without seeing the actual files or a simplified example.

It's almost as if you need to make a decision right at the begining of your rendering project and say OK, I'm going to use the following settings for example...

Indirect Illumination Spherical Room Reflective Walls with a specific material set to "Constant" No Fog lights Shadows set to "Transparent" with "Edge Quality" active "Number of Reflections" set to "8" "Numer of Refreactions" set to "4" These types of lights and this many Shadow/Fog enabled or disabled for each light Etc etc.

It's settings like these that, if not set early, can cause you to start from scratch all over again.

Other settings like Anti-aliasing Quality, Room size, Shadow softness can be adjusted any time without dramatically changing things.

Well I hope there's some usefull tips there!

Mike Wilson

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Reply to
Mike J. Wilson

Fantastic suggestions Mike..... I managed to find the fix myself, it was the transparent shadows thing.... now I've got it looking right, I've got the challenge of stripping the PW settings back so that it doesn't take me a week to render a 30-second flypast animation for the client.

I've saved your suggestions as they're all things that are worth trying should I engounter the same situation again. I've downloaded several of your models and deconstructed them to see how they're done and in many cases they've been a fantastic tutorial.

I've even modelled up the entire egyptian mummy in this one and it does look very cool.... lots of complex curves and even a pretty realistic loking face on the sarcophagus..... bear in mid that I'm more accustomed to modelling "engineering" shapes...... squares and the like :)

Reply to
George Maddever

That's great news!

Glad I could help.

Mike

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Reply to
Mike J. Wilson

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