Making a wall/ceiling invisible?

odastein

Yet another question.  The ceiling of the environment that I'm using prevents me from placing a camera where I want. So, I would like to make it transparent/invisible. I thought that maybe setting the opacity of the ceiling to 0 would do the trick, but it doesn't work. What should I do? 

Enchanted April

Click on the ceiling or wall and than find it in the scene tab. There you can close the little eye to make it invisible...

rames44

Another option (if you’re using iRay) is to use an “iRay section node”, which you can find under the “create” menu. This doesn’t do anything in the viewport (unless yours is in NVidia IRay mode) but it will slice off all the “stuff” on one side of it when you render. You have the option of having it “cut things off” with or without letting additional light in from that direction.  I’ve used these a lot.  There are a number of tutorials on them in the forum.

Tobor

The section plane is a good idea. It's a little hard to set, but after some practice you'll get the hang of it. 

Some sets, particularly older pre-Iray ones, aren't designed with the idea of removing walls and ceilings. There's no "eye" for those segments. I've pretty tossed all my sets that are a single por limited geometry. Walls are easy enough to construct using any of the available walls/ceilings/floors products that have been around. Even old Poser props will work for his.

Use the Opacity trick only if you really have to (and are able). Though I don't think it was the intention with the shader, evidence suggests that even with Opacity down to 0 the geometry may be gone, but remnants of the shader are still lthere. So you can get odd "ghost" artifacts. If you must use this technique try to zero out all the shader settings, and turn off anything that will make a reflection or cause special funcrtions (flakes, emission, translucency, top coat, etc.) from being activated.

On your comment that setting Opacity to 0 didn't work: If there was a surface called ceiling, and turning off the opacity removed it in the preview, it really should not have re-appeared in the render. Something doesn't sound right there.

rames44

I might be wrong, but I thought there was a freebie that had a section plane parented to the camera, a fraction of an inch in front of it. 

Main problem with the section plane is that the Textured Shaded preview doesn’t know about the section plane (since it’s an iRay thing), which means you have to fine tune your camera angle in iRay mode.)

odastein

Enchanted April said:

Click on the ceiling or wall and than find it in the scene tab. There you can close the little eye to make it invisible...

Thanks. 

By the way, there's a sometimes a little "x" on the right on the eye, that you can click on to remove it. But I don't know what it does.

odastein

rames44 said:

Another option (if you’re using iRay) is to use an “iRay section node”, which you can find under the “create” menu. This doesn’t do anything in the viewport (unless yours is in NVidia IRay mode) but it will slice off all the “stuff” on one side of it when you render. You have the option of having it “cut things off” with or without letting additional light in from that direction.  I’ve used these a lot.  There are a number of tutorials on them in the forum.

Another thing that I will leave for later. Too many things to learn (and a bazillion of tutorials too).

odastein

Tobor said:

 

On your comment that setting Opacity to 0 didn't work: If there was a surface called ceiling, and turning off the opacity removed it in the preview, it really should not have re-appeared in the render. Something doesn't sound right there.

 

The ceiling was still appearing in the preview too. Since there are so many things that I don't understand, or that don't work the way I expected, I just assumed that turning opacity to 0 didn't make things transparent, and didn't dig any further.

After using the "closing eye", I realized that the the ceiling had two parts, one of them called "wall" instead of "ceiling", so presumably the "ceiling" did become transparent, but it was only a part of what was above the scene and blocked my camera.

Tobor

Ah, the old two ceilings in one trick! Actually it's fairly common, so that the ceiling itself can have one shader, and the "roof" has another. This way they can each use a simple plane with one surface.

You can't normally click through things when the foreground object is simply made transparent with Opacity. D|S will still select the nearest object even though it's invisible. (In Poser you got the option to "drill down" to deeper objects; I don't know of a similar feature in D|S). Switch to Top view and click the ceiling/roof from there. Do the same for walls, where the walls may actually be two separate planes.

maclean

odastein said:

Enchanted April said:

Click on the ceiling or wall and than find it in the scene tab. There you can close the little eye to make it invisible...

Thanks. 

By the way, there's a sometimes a little "x" on the right on the eye, that you can click on to remove it. But I don't know what it does.

It locks the part so that you can't select it in the viewport. It's handy when you keep accidentally selecting the wrong part. Locking it solves the problem. However, even when locked, you can still select it in the Scene Pane.

Syrus_Dante

First of did you already try the Surface Selection Tool? It enables you to select a surface directly on the object in the viewport. With Ctrl+LeftClick you can add surfaces to the selection and see them in the Surface pane to get an overview what is what. Then you can turn down the opacity of all selected at once.

You can also have a look into the Tool Settings pane with the Geometry Editor tool active. There you get a list with all Face Groups and Surface Groups, once you click on one of them you can see a red highlight on the object and if you press the plus those faces gets selected, pressing Ctrl+F gets the vieport focus on the selection.

If there is no other option you can create a new Surface Group for the parts you want to hide with the Geometry Editor tool, then turn down the opacity on those. To create a new Surface Group select some polygons then right-click the Surfaces entry in the Tool Settings pane and choose Create Surface from Selected or right-click an existing group to Assign Selected Faces to Group.

Also those Selection Sets in the Tool Settings pane with the Geometry Editor tool can get realy handy as selection presets in various situations while editing, because they don't affect important aspects of the item like rigging and materials that is the case with the Face Groups and Surface Groups.

So lets summ up we have three options to hide parts of objects in the Viewport.

• The first is the eye icon that can be found in front of a Node in the Scene pane hirarchy tree and there is also a Visible On/Off property for that in the Parameters pane found in the Display section. This enables you to switch the Visible state for multible selections. If the node is a bone in a figure hirarchy the Face Group that is acociated with the bone gets hidden. The other cursor icon in front of a Node in the Scene pane is called Selectable and there is also an On/Off button in the Parameters pane found in the Display section. The advantage of this in your case is turning off selectable on big environment items blocking you from selecting items in the viewport you want to work on.
• The second and most common option is the material setting opacity of which ever shader you are using in the Surface pane that can be applied to Surface Groups. As Tobor saied some shader settings like specularity and gloss may remain visible with opacity set to zero. Also turn down those shader settings or first apply a simple DzDefault Shader from your content library found in Shader Presets with less surface settings to turn down to make it completly invisible.
• And the third option is the ability of the Geometry Editor tool to hide selected polygons. To do that select something then right-click the Viewport then choose Geometry Visibility>Hide Selected Polygons. But the Geometry Visibility gets reset to show all by reloading a scene therefore is just for editing. BTW once those selected polygons are hidden you can even delete them from the object by a right-click on the viewport again and choose Geometry Editing>Delete Hidden Polygons this time. This makes it possible for example to split up an all in one environment / room into different independent parts to hide or reposition and compose aka kitbashing.

Don't worry to screw up some of the original items while editing them. All changes you make to the items gets saved into the duf scene file and altered items can also get saved as Secene Subsets to merge them into other scenes, but if you realy want to save those individual items for reuse into your library use File>Save As>Support Asset>Figure/Prop Asset and give it another item name, so you don't overwrite the original.

I hope this helps one or another, well if we would have a complete manual you could read all this in there, otherwise its up to us to answer those questions. I hope I provided enougth information for you to find everything what I'm talking about.

odastein

Syrus_Dante said:

 

• And the third option is the ability of the Geometry Editor tool to hide selected polygons. To do that select something then right-click the Viewport then choose Geometry Visibility>Hide Selected Polygons. But the Geometry Visibility gets reset to show all by reloading a scene therefore is just for editing. BTW once those selected polygons are hidden you can even delete them from the object by a right-click on the viewport again and choose Geometry Editing>Delete Hidden Polygons this time. This makes it possible for example to split up an all in one environment / room into different independent parts to hide or reposition and compose aka kitbashing.

That's interesting. In fact, I already wanted to delete part of an object and keep the rest for reuse a couple times, so that might prove useful in the future.

 

I hope this helps one or another, well if we would have a complete manual you could read all this in there, otherwise its up to us to answer those questions. I hope I provided enougth information for you to find everything what I'm talking about

Yes, thanks. It's not that there's a lack of information out there. There are a bazillion of manuals, tutorials, explanations....But finding exactly what I'm interested in can prove difficult nevertheless (or maybe because of that). Or I could end up reading several pages about the specific topic I'm wondering about, and still not find the exact answer I need (like : "on which button do I click to do that?"). Often I don't even know what I want to know. I just know what my problem is but absolutely couldn't tell in which topic I could find the solution. Finally, like here, there might be several solutions, and it's interesting to know about them all. 

In fact, when I do find the answer I'm searching for without asking, it's generally in older threads here (or on similar forums), not in tutorials or manuals. 

odastein

maclean said:

odastein said:

Enchanted April said:

 

Thanks. 

By the way, there's a sometimes a little "x" on the right on the eye, that you can click on to remove it. But I don't know what it does.

It locks the part so that you can't select it in the viewport. It's handy when you keep accidentally selecting the wrong part. Locking it solves the problem. However, even when locked, you can still select it in the Scene Pane.

 

This proved useful yesterday when I had irregular "ground" in my scene and kept clicking on it instead of the characters/props.

Quazaque

Iray section plane.

Here is video about it and download link for iray plane parented to primitive plane for ease of use.

In parameters tab there is 'Clip lights' option. If it is on - the lighting inside room with wall invisible due to iray section plane will be the same as if there was no plane. I mean outside lights will no pass through 'invisible' wall