VBE - transparent textures issue

[Anonymous]

Can anyone comment/explain the issue i'm having with transparent/translucent textures in VBE. Attached image shows views of (from top) exterior view, interior view and exterior view through window.
Basically, water texture (in this case, although this is happening consistently for all transparent textures) is showing fine, unless you are viewing it through another object which has transparency (i.e. a window/glazed balustrade etc.) when it disappears. The last image highlights this issue.

[Karl Ottenstein]

I have not seen this problem.

There is a slider in the menus that controls how transparent transparent surfaces are ... you might try adjusting that to see if the problem either goes away, or gets emphasized so strongly that a tech support rep will be able to really see what is going on when you send them the file.

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

I get this same problem within ArchiCAD 12 in the 3d window sometimes. It isn't constant, and can randomly occur when either viewing through one or even two panes of glass to another transparent. Perhaps it's an OpenGL limitation?

[Anonymous]

The slider....I guess this falls under wish list...the slider is a nice feature however VBe cannot recognize the difference between transparent glazing and translucent glazing. I hope this will be remedied in future updates.

[Anonymous]

Indeed, VBE seems to lack the ability to show objects of varying transparencies. If a material has any transparency at all, once it goes to VBE, all transparent materials seem to get thrown into a pool and VBE shows them all as the same level of clear. Therefore it's almost impossible to show frosted glass vs clear glass. BUT there is a workaround (until graphisoft fixes this in the next update - please!). I found that creating .png images with varying transparency, and applying them as textures works fine. For example, I can go into photoshop, create a blue image with 50% transparency, save it as a .png file, load into my archicad library, and apply it as a texture to my frosted blue glass material in, and when I export to VBE, I get a 50% transparent blue piece of glass! You can do any degree of transparency from 0 to 100% in photoshop, and in any color. Obviously simple frosted glass should be done with white.

[Anonymous]

libengan wrote:
I found that creating .png images with varying transparency, and applying them as textures works fine....

This is what I have done. Since this is new in 14 (transparent textures in OpenGL) I'm not surprised at the limitations.

I would also love to see support for transparent textures with non-transparent materials as we have in LW and the internal engine. That is when the underlying material color shows through the applied texture. I have used this a lot in the past to make a single material that can be easily modified to various colors. Now to support OpenGL and VBe I have to go back to making multiple variations for the color selection.

[Anonymous]

libengan wrote:
I found that creating .png images with varying transparency, and applying them as textures works fine....

Yes but : the window material must have the most transparent png and water the most opaque png( less transparent )
Set the transpareccy in Photoshop opacity slider