Hello,
I have a problem getting transparent pastic material right. Somehow inner faces of this blender are allways rendered solid, even if i set transparent for the whole material!
Also, dont know propper how to get rid of dark shadows that are casted on objects!
Thanks
Is it the inner BACK surface that’s solid? We can see the blade, so it can’t all be non-transparent.
It kind of looks like maybe they’re just not transparent enough, adding up to the grey background. Do you have transparent raytracing enabled?
Yeah, if it’s raytraced transparency I would guess that your ray depth is too low? By default it is set to two, so outside surface -> inside surface -> everything else opaque.
Yes, Ray Transp option level is too low, i set it to 5 and i got object transparent, thanks!
(Pitty that material settings cannot be importet in Blender, or to have some prdefined objects to save time in fast paced projects)
And is there a way to set reflection color ? (it is black by default, but I whant to have other colours in reflections if possible, evn with workarounds!)
Sure you can. Press Shift-F1. Then find the .blend you want to get anything from… you can append anything from one blend into another, either as a duplicated stand-alone copy, or a linked version that will change when the original changes. That’s how you use material libraries in Blender.
Also, re: your plastic/glass look, the with two sets of faces on a “solid” object, make sure the faces point the right way and set the translucency for backface display to make it look more… well, more.
And set the IOR and Fresnel on the transparency material, this is the most important for a gleamy refractive translucent / transparent goodness.
Acrylic-looking plastic is close to water, IOR 1.25-1.45, or whatever you like artistically.
Wow, that last pic posted by Heavily Tesselated looks fantastic. I’ve been trying to make something similar, but without much success.
OT, but related:
What I’m aiming at is something made with transparent acrylic panes, and the edges are showing much more internal reflection on the real object, so that the material’s thickness is almost white along the visible internal edges when viewed at certain angles. Can it be done? With Blender’s internal renderer or with Yafray?
Grafix could you set these faces to have a bit of emit value?
If you’re running 2.42, definitely Blender internal can do it. Transmissivitylicious, it is. The cubes above are Blenternal. Yafray can definitely do what you’re after, too. (and probably better if you take the time to tweak well.)
re: 2.42 & transmissivity, under RayTrans on the material panel, you’ll find two (three) buttons for this, Limit and Falloff. And of course, Filter. The combo of the three can change the optical density of your transparent/translucent object to whatever you can come up with.
The re-reflection, that will be done with Fresnel and RayMirror settings… Fresnel controls how something is reflective beyond a certain angle vs. being translucent/transparent. (dependent on it’s IOR value.) Notice the outer “acrylic” edges and tops of the green and red cubes above getting white, that’s from the Mir color set on the texture, but notice the orange has none of this, and how the red and blue reflect each other but only red’s edge faces the camera in a way that it gets fresnel’d to the reflect color.
That was a 2 minute test scene. That’s the default cube bevelled and extruded, then copied. The magic is Blender, not me. 
It’s not really working for me…:o
I’ve tried various combination of emit, fresnel, raytraced reflectivity and transparency as well as the filter, limit and falloff values. The effects are either too weak or showing up in the wrong places (inner and outer faces, not the internal faces of the hollow cube wall). Take your cubes, for example. I’m able to duplicate that, but as you can see in your pic, the portion in the thickness of the cube wall is still showing transparency. I have a little transparent acrylic puzzle cube on my desk (with little ball bearings inside you try to roll into holes in a plastic plane inside). The edges are totally reflective, no transparency at all, while the faces are highly transparent. It’s a bit hard to describe, but you can’t see through the edge intersections at all. It’s totally reflecting the scene viewed by the inner faces’ normal.
Ah, don’t confuse physics with what we’re doing. 
My cubes above are 6 planes attached in a cube shape, then extruded, then bevelled. There’s nothing solid about them. Illusion is the name of the game.
If it’s not doing 100% reflection like it should when you view/light it past critical angle, just make the bottom face(s) point inward and crank up mirror. Is it cheating? Yep!
I’m gonna have to try that method sometime. Seems easier. But how about coinciding planes on the edges where the panes overlap each other, wouldn’t that produce rendering artifacts (but evidently not, from your example…)
Anyway, I think I solved my problem. I think it was because there was nothing outside the model to reflect, that’s why the internal reflections are not being produced. So I placed everything in a very large white tube with a slight emit value for the tube’s material. A little more tweaking and there it was, reflective edges. Thanks for your pic which prodded me to try harder.
Strange thing, with the transparent png output. In Blender’s render preview window, the objects inside were slightly reflected on the inner faces of the cube. I had the render set to transparent png with the premul button on, and the transparent png output didn’t have the reflections…
I think i have a similar issue with the world image thing showing at the back of the transparent object. i dont know how to change the raytracing transparency and all the guides i can find are on older versions like 2.87 and im on 3.4. how does one change it on newer vesions?
