Making transparent objects seem solid

Hi! I got this problem with transperancy: when I make an object transparent, it doesn´t look solid: you can see the faces filter the image. For example, when I make a transparent cockpit, I can see that the glass filters the objects behind it differently wheter there´s one or two transparent faces in the way. It looks like if there were air or vacuum between the faces, not like it was a solid object.

Does anyone got any tips of what I could do to make this go away?

If you don´t understand the question I could send an image. The clock is 23:02, I´m tired and my english sux :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you talking about trying to get refraction? Like a glass sphere ball?
If so, blender doesn’t natively support refraction, and you’d have to fake it the best you could.

What I mean is following: If a make a mesh cube, and add a transparent material to it, it doesn´t look like a solid cube made of glass or something. It looks like if the different faces were thin walls of glass, and the cube was fille with air/vacuum.

I guess that´s what you´re saying…

Any raytracers you can recommend? Thanks anyway!

thats the problem of a scanline renderer. You buy speed and you sell effects. Maybe virtualight is what you need (haven´t worked with it yet)

HH

I have also thought about ways to do this in Blender. I was wondering how to possibly do bio-luminesence with blender. It is possible to get a glow effect but not one that looks good. Also with skin, it’s hard to get skin to look perfect, and glass. I think layers might work, take a jellyfish for example. What if you model the jellyfish, then duplicate and scale down. Then make the outside layers translucent with no glow, then make the inner one glow, this would give you that organic depth look.

I would like to try this sometime if I get the time. But if someone does try it, let me know how it looks.

You must create TWO envmaps (well one and use it twice)

One to fake reflection the usual way

The second shoud fake refraction. For a sphere it works nicely by inverting all scales (ScaleX,Y,Z=-1) in the texture.

It will NEVER look like a true RayTracer, anyway

Stefano

Well, you can ‘solve’ this problem by moving the faces closer to eachother. That way it doesn’t look that obvious.

You could try the refraction plugin maybe, but it is no replacement for raytracing of course…