Hi there! Long story short, I haven’t done any Blendering in a long, long time, so today I upgraded to the new version (and the new, confusing UI) and started a simple little 2 hour render to get back into the habit. I got halfway through modeling out a pocketwatch I happened to have on my desk, and decided to grab some materials from the material repository (that still seems to be up) just to test the composition.
The problem is that the glass top of the watch seems to be transparent alright, but everything below it is cast into very dark shadow that totally hides all the inner parts, making it look just gray and black. I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s casting a shadow like that, especially since it’s perfectly transparent otherwise. Can one of you guys in better practice take a look at it and see what’s going on? I’m sure it’s some dumb little error I missed in the new user interface. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply. Turning on Receive Transparent Shadows seems to have worked for the white element, but the gears inside are still flat black along their top. Oddly enough, the sides of them are well lit enough, but the ones directly facing towards the light source are black. Moving the glass off so it doesn’t cast a shadow on them, but still forces the camera to look through it, doesn’t produce this effect.
EDIT: Actually, turning Receive Shadows off completely seems to have the same problem. It always turns black when under the glass. The aluminium does too.
You need to look at your Mirror and Transparency settings. I believe it is the Mirror settings for the most part but you should be able to get some better results by trying to remove mirror first and then working on how much alpha is in your transparency.