Is that a tarnished mirror behind the bar or just rusty metal? The long view down the whole pub is nice with the lighting you've gone for - what's the story going to be?

What I did was make a cube in sketchup and put the tarnish / rush / distressed texture with transparency on one face and...

Wouldn't it be easier to just pop in a backdrop using a camera output as its texture, position the camera to act as a mirror, then add the rust texture to the camera as an overlay?

Danimal wrote:



Yeah, you could do it that way pretty easily but you'd be stuck with 0% or 100% transparency. The point of the object import method is that you could have some of the tarnished sections with 70% transparency, others with 30% transparency, other areas with 100% transparency so you could mix it up a bit more for the look you were going for, as in my screen shot example, the image I've used only had 0% or 100% transparency and you'd probably want to tone it done quite a bit for use in a scene - with backdrops or camera over lays you wouldn't be able to do that.

There isn't a tutorial on doing this specifically for Muvizu, may be I'll find a spare minute or 2 and do one.

Basically though -

1. Go to photoshop

2. Create a new image, 256x256 pixels is probably good for a shower curtain unless you want it to be highly detailed.

3. Pick the colour you want it to be and use the paint bucket tool to apply that colour at 100% opacity

4. Go the channels tab (normally this is on the bottom right hand corner of the photoshop window, next to the layer tab)

5. At the bottom of this window there is a little button that looks like a piece of paper with the bottom left hand corner of it folded up. If you hover the mouse over it then it'll say "Create new channel". Click this.

6. You'll now have a black image, don't worry this is the alpha your seeing. Go back to your paint bucket tool and change the opacity to 50% or 60% or whatever level you want. Once you paint bucket the image it'll turn a shade of grey.

7. Look at your channels tab, you'll see that your RGB, Red, Green, Blue channels are not visible. Click the little eye icon on the left hand side of each channel and your image will appear again - though now it will have a red tint to it. This red is the opacity on the image.

8. Save the image as a TGA (targa) file

9. Go to sketchup and create or open the shower curtain model. Apply your newly created TGA as the material. Adjust the tile / position / etc in sketchup and then export your model

10. Open Muvizu and go Import Object. Select your ASE file and then look at the "Map alpha to" drop down option. This needs to be set as "Opacity".

11. Click import and move it into place in your set, you should now have a 50% or 30% or whatever level transparent shower curtain.

Hope this all makes sense!