Making Transparent Objects

Thanks for tips, blaydrnnnr. I looked at the tutorial and had kind of a hard time. Probably because I skipped some of the tutorials.. I’ll go back through them.

I’m working putting a B-24 Liberator together right now, I’ve got most of the fuselage and turrets and engines in place and designed some landing gear, just have to put the doors on the bottome of the engine nacelles and the nose gear and get the nose, turret and tail canopies looking right.

Can anyone help me with the process of making an object appear transparent? I’ve wanted to model WW2 warbirds and older AF jets but can’t figure out how to make a transparent canopy. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One other thing.. intakes for engines and some other things get distorted when they are smoothed. How can I make sure that certain surfaces remain flat without being rounded and distorted?

Thanks for your help.

Welcome Richard!!!
As far as making your canopy look transparent, first, there is a tutorial on canopies, look in the tutorial section of the Amabilis website. Now, you could try using one of the pre-defined textures in the internal POV renderer, it has clear glass as well as some ‘tinted’ glasses. Or you could turn the translucent up in the texture your using on the canopy. If you look at the materials pallet, there are things like diffuse, ambient, translucency, and specular. You can change these to suit your needs on a given texture or material. The higher the percentage of the translucency, the more transparent it becomes. I highly recommend the canopy tutorial. I’ve used it many times on my war birds. The problem your having with the distortion on your intakes is just a matter of playing around with the crease operation. After smoothing the object, you can deliberatlly crease certain places or parts of the object. It takes some practice, and I’m sure there will be someone here who can give you a much better example. Hope this was some help.