I use fog on my Layout drawings all of the time. However when I use fog, the fog colours in the background of my model view. It ignores whether the “Background” option in the Sketchup Model pane’s Style tab is set to transparent or not. Perhaps this is a bug?
Would love for the option for the background to be transparent or not, regardless of the fog setting.
I have recently been getting excited mixing the Concepts app on the iPad with Layout drawings. You can see my intent in the images below.
This seems like a bug to me. There already is a setting for showing background or not in the viewport. Overriding the setting just because there is a fog is redundant, non-intuitive and makes no one happy.
Can you not achieve the effect with masking? You could set up a scene (without camera position) that changes colors so that you can use the image as a mask to be combined with the foggy image.
I think this is a better approach because transparent background contradicts the nature of fog. Fog occludes what is behind, a behavior which you desire on your building. Logically, the background (where there is no geometry) is completely occluded and opaque.
While I understand the logic behind fog contradicting a background it sure would be useful to combine them, and redundant to always hide the background, as there already is an option for whether the background should be shown.
A more intuitive behavior would perhaps be that fog is alpha-transparent in LayOut (when the viewport i set to not have its own background)? This way you could place the viewport over some other graphic and have that becoming the fog/background.
Well @eneroth3 I wouldn’t call this a bug. It’s designed this way. And it’s logical too.
Wherever there is no geometry visible through the fog, the fog will be infinitely deep, so logically it will not be transparent. #usingmanywords just to say I agree with @Aerilius
However it’s a nuisance from a user’s perspective. Few users regard ‘infinite fog’ as an un-transparent medium, they just see it as their background color, even if it isn’t. I don’t agree that a mask is good idea though. It’s very labout intensive to set up.
Scenes with Fog without sky/ground be transparent as if it’s a background
1a. or at least as transparent as it would be in SketchUp.
Scenes with Fog with sky/ground be non-transparent
For 1a, see below image, the middle row has same density of fog (100% at infinite distance) but the left one, having no sky or ground, looks much less transparent then the right one, which does have a sky&ground:
Okay, it’s probably not a bug but a quite undesired behavior. Since the fog color in SketchUp typically is the background cover (unless specifically overridden) I think most users would expect to see the background through the fog, even in LayOut. That’s why I think the fog depth should simply be used as a alpha map for the viewport in LO (if the viewport is set to have no background of its own).
I think I weigh in on Eneroth’s view: it is undesired behaviour.
And masking is indeed too labour intensive to call a long term solution (it also cuts the thickness of lines in half if you trace the lines).
Though alpha maps are a nice idea, I know that LayOut really struggles performance-wise with translucent images, so best get performance sorted out before implementing it.
