Does anyone know a way to make a translucent texture?
Im thinking of something like those japanese paper-wall-type-things (is that understandable?) where light penetrates but no clear or visible objects can be seen except for silhouettes.
Hello
to make a traslucent texture open the Gimp or other app,
do your texture job and when finished “play” with the
opacity slider (let’s say 50%) and save the image in
TGA format without compression.
Now when you’l open this image in Blender you can see “trouhg it”?
Is this clear?
Bye
António
Yeah, your coming out clearly :), although I dont think I am.
The method you gave was Transparency not TRANSLUCENTS
I already know about transparencies.
Translucent by defintion is:
- Transmitting light but causing sufficient diffusion to prevent perception of distinct images.
So I guess what I meant was that the texture has to let light “through” yet not be “see through”…er…I think the best way to explain is this:
*Get a piece of paper
*Go to a lamp and turn it on (by lamp, i mean in real life;) )
*Put your hand in front of the lamp
*put the paper between your line of vision (thats in between your hand and head) but closer to your hand.
*Notice that while not seeing every detail and structure of your hand, light still penetrates through paper and your hand is “visible”.
Thats the “effect” Im after. 
Sorry, I guess I might not have been clear enough, my bad :-?
so you want to have “shadows” of an object/s visible through the material? You could either just get a silhouette of the object and use it for the texture, or you could use an object in front of the material, with an alpha of 0.001 and a shadow only spot shining on it. A shadow would be cast on the wall, but you wouldn’t notice the object with an that low alpha.
I hope that’s what you wanted…
I understand what you are going for, but I think it will be very difficult to do in blender.
Perhaps this might be a “work around”: Decide what you want to be “seen” through the translucent object and render it seperately to indavidual files. Use a batch process to blur the hell out of them and make an animation from the blurred files. Now start a new blender file and make your “rice paper screen”. Make the screen semi transparent with a sort of “rice paper” texture on it. Behind the screen place a plane and for it’s texture, use the super blurred animation that you made earlier.
Just a thought.
Thanx for the help fellas
I’ll try those methods out (kinda busy right now :-? )
You can use the Zbuffer or Env Map to render a shadow using an empty. Use a copy of what is behind the translucent object and put it in front. then render a shadow of the object onto the translucent obj. then render without the copy. I will explain better later…got to go, Tornado Warnings :o
It’s possible, but you’ll need to render your animation twice.
Let’s say your scene is a dojo wall with a person behind it, and there’s a pillar in front of the wall.
You’ll need two scenes-
Scene 1) The normal-textured person, and a shadless black pillar and room. The wall should not be included in this scene.
Render your animation like this, but at 25% resolution.
Scene 2) The normal-textured pillar, and the wall with it’s normal texture, and also with the Scene1 animation with “Win” mapping and “Col” set to around 25% and “add” instead of “mix” as a second texture.
Hopefully that all makes sence.
This will show a blurred person silhouetted behind a translucent wall.
and also with the person’s animation with “Win” mapping and “Col” set to around 25% and “add” instead of “mix”
Now when you say that, do you mean as one of the texture channels on the “Wall” Material?
Sorry I wasn’t very clear- I edited my message to read:
Scene 2) The normal-textured pillar, and the wall with it’s normal texture, and also with the Scene1 animation with “Win” mapping and “Col” set to around 25% and “add” instead of “mix” as a second texture.