Smooth Transparency Gradient

[Fletch]

I have a .png material, but the gradient is not smooth. It looks fine in SketchUp, but looks bad when rendered with Twilight. Why?!

There are 2 ways that an alpha channel of a png can be used in a material. It could be a "clipping mask" or a "transparency mask".
A clipping mask finds a "level" of transparency in the alpha channel and makes it the "clipping" point. That is, below "50% transparent" the image will be solid, above 50% transparent, it will be clear.
A transparency mask uses the png's alpha channel's full transparent gradient. This means it will also take longer for it to render.

The easiest way to get the .png's transparency to be read in Twilight as a "transparency mask" is to import the image as .png and leave it as an unexploded image.

[Gaieus]

The easiest way to get the .png's transparency to be read in Twilight as a "transparency mask" is to import the image as .png and leave it as an unexploded image.

Hi Fletch, thanks for the tip but...

What if I want (need) to use it as a texture instead?

[Fletch]

Then the only way is to apply it as a texture, but also insert it as an image. Then export the scene to Kerkythea. In Kerkythea, you will find the image texture, save it in a library, and then go back to SU and apply that library material from KT to your texture in SU.

[Gaieus]

Fair enough, Mr Fletch, all understood!

[Marcus84]

Hi,
my name is Marcus I am new to this forum, but quite experienced with Sketchup since > 10 years and with some rendering applications, mostly histrorical architecture. After some tries with other renderers, I found Twilight very convenient and though of buying the full version as my one and only renderer.
But: the described problem of missing gradient trancparency of png textures is a huge disadvantage. I have dozens of different tree types (rectagles follwoing the camera with semi transparent tree images) in my models and cannot shift to Kerkythera every time.
As the topic I am responding to is almost 10 years old, I am wondering if there was there any update of Twilight (at least in Pro) that alows now the use of transparency gradients? Or is it annouced for the near future?

Thank you

Marcus

[Fletch]

Gradient transparency on textures works by default in SketchUp and Twilight V2
No worries, no special effort.