Using SU2026 on Mac Sonoma, I can’t see how to make a face translucent/partly transparent.
Can’t find any previous relevant posts searching for “opacity”.
I click on the opacity slider for the default material (or any colour), adjust it to (say) 30%, then click on a face to set it to partially transparent.
No change to its opacity.
What am I doing wrong?
Yes, I have an in-model material selected. I’ve tried both with the default material selected, and with other colours selected - eg white or grey - that I thought were in model.
But just in case I only had a colour selected that wasn’t “in model” I’ll try again in a few minutes.
I’ll share a simple example shortly, when I get to my computer.
Opacity.skp (78.2 KB)
Simple example that I can’t get to work as I expect.
The left rectangle is just plain grey.
Right hand rectangle won’t apparently ‘take’ the 25% opacity I’ve set and tried to apply with the Paint Bucket tool.
It doesn’t work in SU2025 either, but does work as I expected in SU2023.
Is this a bug, or has the process changed in some way that isn’t obvious (to me, at any rate).
This includes the former missing part.
In SU 2026 when I move the opacity slider, neither rectangle changes opacity - both stay at 100%.The only thing that changes opacity is the little square bottom left: it goes from grey to see through. But neither rectangle changes.
Hmmm. An unexpected result of fiddling around. I applied the sample eyedropper first to the right rectangle. That created a new entry in the colour selector panel.
Then I selected that entry, applied it with the paint brush to the right rectangle, and bingo, it goes translucent.
Not obvious, not afaik mentioned in the help (though I’ll look again) and more complicated than in SU 2023.
The ‘gray’ material is 100% opaque. If you give it some transparency it works, BUT you cannot have one material applied to faces and expect the opacity to change for only one of them. To do that you need to make a duplicate of the material with everything the same except you change its opacity. Apply that new material to some faces and you’ll now have similar materials on faces but some of them can have transparency…
I did have, but it still didn’t make any difference to the opacity of either rectangle when I moved the opacity slider. The screen capture may have lost the highlighting.
That was one problem - I couldn’t get the opacity slider to make any difference to the transparency of either rectangle, either while moving the slider (which is supposed to change the applied material) or by re-applying the part-opaque material with the paint brush. This still seems completely non-intuitive, and worked differently in SU2023.
@TIG’s observation makes sense - I need a duplicate material if I want both opaque and translucent versions of the same colour or texture, which I achieved by accident!
I’m busy on something else for a while, but I’ll do some more homework, including
The bottom slider affects the opacity of the selected swatch material. Your swatches are empty at the moment, so you’re changing nothing. If there was a material in the swatches, you could select it, set the opacity, and paint bucket apply the material to a face. Then it becomes an in model material, with the opacity you had set.
If you want to change the opacity of an existing in model material, you would double-click it to get to the Edit section. Then the opacity slider will change the opacity of the selected in model material, and it will change on any face that it is used on.
My trouble was (and still is) that it (moving the opacity slider) affects both rectangles equally, in that neither is affected at all!
But @colin’s post suggests what’s going on, though I don’t fully understand it.
More homework, either later tonight or tomorrow.
I thought they had an in-model material (grey colour). Why not? The grey was applied to both rectangles, so the swatch shouldn’t be “empty”.
The large swatch on the left does show the last material you sampled. I meant the little swatches, are all empty. Doesn’t matter though, that was only to explain what the opacity slider does when you are not editing an in model material.
Double-clicking (or right-click, Edit) on an in model material will give you an opacity slider that does work.
The swatch materials are the tiny squares in the color panel that you show in your 1st image and Colin says that the transparency slider above the swatch area affect the color selected from the swatch area which are currently empty as shown in your image.
The swatch materials are different from in model materials. Every time you open a new file you will have your swatch with the materials you have chosen. To get materials on swatch area you just have to drag a material from the sample square to the small square on the swatch area.
I wrote this when I was waiting for my grandson to get out of school and I thought I had sent it. Anyway, I’ll send it now.
Expanding on what @Charevir wrote, the array of swatches are a feature that the SketchUp material window inherited from the macOS color chooser. The material editor is a custom tweak of the color chooser. The colors in the swatch are actually shared across the OS with any app that uses the color chooser. As such, there are limits and differences between what the SketchUp material editor can do with the swatches vs what it can do with its own popup material editor window,
