[marseille13]

hello,

I want to make a material (a single color) a bit transparent (opacity property in the su material editor). When doing so it will rendered like a glass material, with shininess/ reflection.
I just want to have the color kept and transparent, without reflection/ shininess.
What would be the best setup in the maxwell plugin materials tab?

thx

[JDHill]

There are a couple of ways. First, to understand a bit about how & why the plugin creates a glass-like material in some circumstances, it is only necessary to remember that SketchUp has no way of saying that a material should be rough or not. Meaning, in automatically translating SketchUp models, the plugin needs to make some guesses about what the intention was for a given material, so that it can create glass-like materials (it creates AGS) when that is what the designer probably wanted. The guess is based on the opacity, and the color of the material; it is assumed that if you have a material that is not fully opaque, and is also using a pretty bright color, that you are probably using it in the windows of a building. The actual rule used is this (using terms & ranges matching the HSB color picker in SketchUp's material editor):

Code: Select all

if opacity < 100 then
    if brightness > 50 or saturation < 10 then
        create an AGS material

With that in mind, we see that in order to coax the plugin into creating a non-AGS material, we just need to alter the color of the material.

Another way would be to change the material's Character from the Automatic type to the SSS (Single-Sided) type, set the desired roughness, and use a negative Asymmetry value. However, this will generally be more expensive (CPU-wise) than a semi-opaque material made using the Automatic character, with a color that does not trigger the creation of an AGS material.

[marseille13]

thank you for the explanation.
Is it possible to convert any rgb-color to hsb with brightness < 50 and saturation > 10?

[JDHill]

No, but you could always use the alternative approach of leaving opacity=100 in the SketchUp material, and then using the plugin's Object Properties window to adjust the opacity of objects directly, irrespective of their materials.