Transparent Faces in Viewport

Hi All,

I’ve got a long-shot question here.

For my reflected ceiling plans, my current workflow is to have my scene and section set to looking up at the ceiling, and then when bringing it into LayOut, I flip the viewport.

The thing is, it’s good to show a ghosted version of your furniture plans under lighting plans (and the furniture plan is taken by looking down rather than up), so I’ve been overlaying a VP with the furniture only on. My problem is that the lines of the furniture VP overlay the RCP VP below. It would be much cleaner graphically if I could put that furniture layout underneath the RCP layout. However that doesn’t work because the faces of the RCP block everything.

Short video attached with my issue. I know about the style wireframe, but that doesn’t work in this case for me because the ceiling of the floor above is also attached to the entire level above, which means that wireframe would show all of the lines of the components from the level above. Hopefully that makes sense.

What would be ideal for me is if all visible faces in a VP could be made transparent.

Any thoughts? Again, it’s a long shot, I know.

Background Transparency Question

I would make the furniture VP wireframe and perhaps change its tags to use dashed lines.

Thanks for the suggestion Anssi. Those dashed lines would still overlay my RCP lines.

When I put a dashed line over a continuous one, what I see is a continuous line.

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I was working on a similar workflow for dashed lines and thought I had something by exploding a vectored viewport so as to have only lines to lay on top, but the act of exploding the viewport made all hidden geometry visible. Ugh, why!? If I export the vectored viewports to PowerCADD - not a problem with the hidden geometry. Working within Layout, the results are not what I would expect.

I do, too. Usually I place the wireframe dashed line viewport under a Vector rendered Hidden Line viewport with solid lines.

You could try playing around with the Vector rendering and a style with hidden line mode on.

I found this usually renders the VP as if faces was on, however its just the lines. For example, the image below. The Hatch is actually behind the lines around it, and there would technically be a face over the top of the hatch which isn’t rendered in layout.

The limitation in this case would be the colour of the walls here (hidden line won’t render colours). So to fix you can have 3 VP’s, 1st at the back have your RCP shown above with colours, then over the top have the furniture, then have a vector hidden line, not sure if this would work though as only the lines will show over the furniture.

Can you use SketchUp’s double sided faces to make the outside of your model (looking inwards) invisible?

Paint the outside face of your ceiling in a totally transparent material (if it is a solid ( paint the inside faces in the same material too.