Weird Random Problem

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hey all
I have been gone on break but I am back. (I am sure none of you missed me) But I am encountering a weird problem. I am trying to make a simple light. (AKA bright blue ball that is slightly transparent) And I adjust the alpha levels and the little model to the left makes the mateirial go opaque. THis is great exactly what I want. However when I render it comes out solid. SO in short how do I implement my Alpha setting. Does it have to be part of a texture or something

Any help would be awsome
THanks
BlackManta :Z

2

try in the mirror transp pane, turning on ztransp and giving power of fresnel for transparency a value other then 0.

3

AH HA
ok thanks one more inquirery and perhaps I am mistaken, but the more opaque the object gets the less light it emits (From what I know of image processing this shouldn’t necessarily be the case, is it possible to make them almost invisible with a strong ambient light ? (Again Blender could work differently)
I have it mapped to the emmit texture but I am not exactly sure what controls that map (eg…Col, Var, Nor, Disp…etc)

BlackManta :Z

4

This is a very common woe: It’s just a little bit tricky but here are some steps that should help:

There are two kinds of transparency in blender, Z-Trans and Ray-Trans, which can be enabled in the “Mirror Transp” panel.

Z-Trans is Z-buffer based while Ray-Trans uses ray-tracing, for Ray-Trans to work you have to have the “Ray” button pushed in the “Render” panel under the render buttons (F10).

  1. Switch to “Shading” buttons (F5).
  2. In the “Mirror Transp” panel press either the Z-Trans or Ray-Trans button.
  3. Set the “A” (for alpha) slider in the “Material” panel to the transparency you want.

Some other notes, you’ll need to enable the “Traceable” button for an object to be ray traced, which is in the “Shaders” panel. Also in order to cast transparent shadows you’ll need to enable them on the objects behind your transparent object by pressing the “TraShad” button also in the “Shaders” panel.

May seem a bit silly doing all that for a simple effect but you can control it alot more to get some interesting effects.

Sorry if that’s a bit jumbled if you can’t get it working let me know and I’ll try to be more clear on a step by step basis.

5

Haha I need to type faster, also might wanna play with the “SpecTra” slider in the “Mirror Transp” panel.