[REQ] Back Face Color Texture and Transparency

Hi all,

I have this little request for Sketchup Styles: that we are able to control back color as a Texture, with or without alpha or a Transparent color.

I’ve been doing it by painting the overall group of the project with a transparent material but then I have to be extra careful to paint all front faces.

I believe in 3d world this is called “backface culling” and it’s oh so handy for so many modelling and presentation scenarios that I really hope it will be integrated sometime.

I also wonder if there can be some kind of hack for this, accessible to plugin developers, just in case the feature request takes some time to implement… :wink:

I’d appreciate any comment or critics and thanks to all!

I’ve also been thinking of a way to hide back faces completely. It should probably be turned off by default to be more friendly to novice users, but in some use cases it would be really handy, like not ending up with the camera inside a solid object and just see back faces when viewing a building interior. Could perhaps even improve performance as fewer faces would be drawn, I don’t know.

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Exactly!

I definitely like the idea for performance reasons too.

However, controlling front/back face’s transparency, color and texture, on styles tab, like you can with regular sketchup material, would be my major concern.

It’s useful in a lot of architectural image types.

Here’s an example how I faked it in SU:

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