Material Transparency > Printing/PDFing Solid

[owen]

OK i can remember discussion on the fact that GS has changed how the 25% etc Fills work but cannot find where it took place (might have been in the Beta forums?).

I am assuming this change is also what has broken our standard rendering technique .. that is the Internal Rendering Engine with Transparency on which we used for ALL our internal AC 3D views

Attached is the appearance of glass as it has been since the time I started using AC6. This is also how it has appeared when sent to a printer or published to PDF .... until now.

Now what we get if we try to Print/PDF this is the image on the right.

Is this just the way it is now or is there a setting to get this pre-10 out-of-the-box printing back?

I want someone from GS to come here and explain to our office that one of the great new features in 10 is that 90+% of the 3D drawings we produce will now look like a pile of shit

P.S anyone noticed the GS censor doesn't work for RSS feeds?

[Anonymous]

There are still vector dot fills available that are like the old 25% fill. Try "Plaster" or "Gypsum Board". You probably should duplicate one and rename it "Glass". You will probably also want/need to adjust the dot spacing and pen setting to get the look you are after.

[Thomas Holm]

On the other hand, why introduce bit-mapped rasterizing of glass when it's finally not required anymore? I've had problems with it from day one. Had to adjust transparency to 100% to get rid of it.
Now I can get the result you (I) want (a light color on the transparent surfaces) just by adjusting the color of the glass material. And now, I get full visibility (if I like) of items behind the glass, with no degrading of the image like with the old bit-maps.

[owen]

I must be doing something wrong ... even with Transparency set to 100%, 0% Attenuation and no fill (i.e Airspace) it still prints with a solid cover fill .... no idea where it's getting the grey color from either

I have also tried one of the vectorial dot pattern fills to try and replicate the old way and this too prints solid.

What we liked about the old transparency method was the fact you still picked up the material colours behind the glass, and layers of glass gained in opacity due to the overlapping dots. This gave the images more of a sense of depth than what we get now. While the lines of elements behind still show through their material colours don't. Its all very flat in our opinion.

The problem with using a vectorial fill to replicate the old transparency method is it relies on enabling Vectorial Fills in the 3D window - so you will get all materials vectorial fills. Often we don't want to show these whilst still showing material transparency.

I'm having no luck finding the thread where this change to the fills was discussed, can anyone point me in the right direction?