Hi Michael (or anyone else who may know how to do this),

I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no,' but I thought I'd ask anyway. Is there anyway to create a transparent or slightly transparent surface (not show through the underlying curves)?

If not, perhaps you can add this feature in V4. Even a 'hack' like putting *75 in the name of the color to set opacity to 75%. I seem to remember you saying something somewhere about not supporting opacity b/c of having to calc the hidden lines correctly-- but for some reason I thought that would be done at a rendering abstraction layer.

FWIW, I'm building some 'cones of movement' with the MoI mannequin for an ergonomics study and would like to be able to 'see-thru' those cones. Thanks.

By Max Smirnov
script:/* Transparence */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; var so=gd.getSelectedObjects(); if (so.length>0) { so.setProperty( 'displayMode',1); so.setProperty( 'selected', 0); } else { gd.getObjects().setProperty( 'displayMode',0); }

Allways select something before call it else all objects of the screen will be transparent! ;)
Toggle script! So re-click again shorcut for appear new!

Hi Chipp - transparency for surfaces hasn't been a priority yet because of the hidden line view (View > "Display hidden lines" checkbox) which when enabled already lets you get an idea of the structure of hidden objects and also allow you to select edges and curves.

It is also possible to set objects into "faint wireframe" mode where the surfaces are hidden and the edges are displayed in a dashed style, that's what Pilou shows above.

I would like to add in an actual transparent surface mode in the future but it's hard to say when it will be implemented, because there is far more work to do to make it happen than just modifying a transparency value. In order to do a transparent display requires a lot of special attention to the draw order of polygons in the display engine, they have to be drawn in back to front order in order for the opacity to work correctly. That sorting can tend to incur a high performance cost and so it's something that has to be implemented with a lot of care, making it a fairly time intensive feature to add.

- Michael

PERFECT!!!

Thanks very much Frenchy :-)

Hi
Is it possible to modify the texture properties of surfaces other than the diffuse colour? Can the sepcular value be adjusted?
Thanks
Keith

Hi Keith,

> Is it possible to modify the texture properties of surfaces other than the diffuse colour?
> Can the sepcular value be adjusted?

Sorry no there isn't currently any way to separately adjust the specular color of an object, that's something that you would normally do in a rendering program instead of inside of MoI.

You can enable specular highlights on or off for the display though by going to Options > View > "Lighting options".

- Michael

Ok
Thanks for the quick reply.