half transparent 2D FaceMe people

[mumpi]

Hi,
i have tried everything (including searching this forum) i can imagine to render 30% white 2d FaceMe people, no success.
Applying transluent/thick curtaín with 30% scattering and tickbox for blended clip and
weld verticies is the closest but they become greyish as well as everything else i tried with alpha or textures instead of images.

I cannot get them look like the pic provided.

I made my people in PS as .png with 30% opacity and transparent background and have to render the whole scene in interior mode

What is the secret?

thanks a lot in advance

bernd

[Fletch]

These people in your reference image look to me like photoshop, not rendered.

I'm attaching a scene with 2D Silhouette people components painted white with 40% opacity. They are then rendered with Twilight, no material tweaks. They look as I would expect. But they don't look like your picture because in the reference picture they are glowing.

[Chris]

For Twilight Render Pro users, there is a way.

When you create a partially transparent material, the material is given a percentage of "transparent" effect and a percentage of "diffuse" effect (normal light bouncing off a surface). If a material has an alpha of 40%, then 60% is transparent and 40% is diffuse. Note that it is balanced, the total adds up to 100%.

However, Pro users can do the following:

1. Open the material in the Template Material Editor and apply "Flat -> Flat" to it.
2. Change the Alpha (under the SketchUp dropdown at the bottom) to 40%
3. Under Tools, choose "Convert to Deep". The Deep Material Editor will now open.
4. You will see two "channels" with stuff in them, Diffuse and Refraction. Refraction is a kind of transparency.
5. Under Diffuse, click on Color. You should see a Weight of 0.4 (our 40% from above). Change it to 0.5.
6. Under Refraction, click on Transparent. You should see a Weight of 0.6 (60%). Change it to 0.8.

You can play with the amount of "glow" by increasing or decreasing the weights. You can make the figures brighter by increasing the Diffuse weight, or make them more transparent (and brighter) by increasing the Refraction weight.

Now, your material is reflecting 130% of the light that hits it. Normally this would not be desirable (it certainly isn't realistic). But in this case, it will cause the characters to have transparency but also, literally, glow. This will give them a brighter appearance that more closely matches your reference image. It can be used in both the biased (Low/+ to High/+) and the unbiased (Interior/+) settings. Note, however, that with the Interior settings, the glow will shed light on the surrounding geometry, though probably not noticably. This won't happen for the Low-High settings.

[mumpi]

Hi Chris,
this is absolut perfect. Your people are looking much better than the ones in the pic and their look is controllable.
Interesting to see that the greyish people are looking like ghosts=negative and the white ones like angels=positive (concerning an usual presentation for some customer).


Fletch, thanks a lot for the .skp,
my problem was that my faceme people are not outlined, i think in this case (cannot explode the person inside the faceme) no transparencies are rendered.
The biker is one face, the dog is outlined inside the rectangle face. (Biker with 40% opacity out of PS, dog painted white with 40% opacity inside su)

The second pic shows both as simple "one face" faceme ( both 40% out of PS) with applied material : transluent/thick curtaín with 30% scattering and tickbox for blended clip and weld verticies.
Not that bad but if they are in front of some concrete background they become pretty greyish. The "glow" of the deep material editor does the trick.

Thank you guys, incredible support for the no1 su render engine, mystery solved.

bernd