I’m testing Envision for my company. Never used it before. I have a shop light model that has a transparent cover over the fluorescent tubes. It has a transparent material applied to it. It is selectable and editable in Sketchup and Enscape. However, in Envision the material/geometry is either not there or not selectable. I can select the material on the housing and the fluorescent tubes but not the transparent cover. Any idea why this would be?
Hello! If you search for the material by name in the Materials panel at the bottom of Envision’s UI, are you able to find it?
Have you tried Enscape to Envision live-link to see if the issue persists?
If still not there, it’s highly likely that both the geometry and its associated material are missing because the object itself was not imported. Model lines and similar host-native elements are not always exported as renderable geometry through Enscape/.vrscene, so they may not be transferred to Envision at all. If that’s the case, feel free to share a bit more information about how the object was created and we’ll gladly help investigate the best way to get it across.
Best,
if the material on the cover has a transparency from a transparent PNG or via an external image/map and it is set to “cutout” in enscape - things similar to this can happen - I can’t appear to override that and switch it to a glass like material.
As a side note to Chaos - There appear to be some differences between how the alpha/transparency is handled between enscape and envision - using live link button inside of enscape viewport.
Here is a material in enscape from a transparent PNG applied as a cutout (random internet image) Cutout doesn’t exist, pikachu occludes and there are no refractions - as expected.
on the backside I have entirely transparent PNG. Also as expected, fundamentally entirely invisible (can’t click on this in envision however)
however if I apply the same image as “cutout” in envision, the (is it using the green channel?)
3
actual image for your reference here
Hi Adam,
Thank you for the observations. There are a couple of separate issues here, so I’d like to address them individually.
- Regarding the backside appearing transparent and the surface being non-interactable, could you please confirm which Envision build you are currently using, as well as which DCC application the Enscape link was established from? Both of these issues should have been addressed as of Envision 1.6.
- Regarding the cutout and alpha-channel readout from the green channel, that is certainly a possibility, nice catch. I’ll raise this with the development team for investigation. At the moment, we generally recommend using black-and-white alpha masks, although we also have existing improvement requests for explicit channel selection per texture input.
Best,
(This Pikatchu will be serving us in internal testing now 
)
So, after further investigation, I discovered that what I thought was the cover was actually an Enscape rectangle light with a material applied to it. I’m assuming that is why it’s not showing in Envision. So, my next question is how to make the fluorescent tubes glow. There is an emissive material applied to them, but they do not glow. The rectangle light is placed in front of the tubes to provide the actual lighting to the scene.
I figured out that right clicking on the “Self Ilumination” icon gave me the ability to adjust the intensity of the light glow. Maybe, move that down into the main settings panel. It’s not very intuitive where it’s at now.
Hi again, thanks for the clarification.
Just to get a bit more context on your setup: in the scene where the back face is missing, is the material applied only to one side of the surface? I’m asking because otherwise I wouldn’t expect the material to become completely invisible from the back (unless if explicitly done so or by differences in tiling/face).
As for the missing selection issue, we do handle incoming opacity/translucency differently from native materials. Because of that, fixes we already introduced for a similar issue do not seem to apply here, mostly due to how cut-out is handled. So I’ll submit a separate report for this case.
Thank you,
Hi jkollars66,
I’m glad you managed to figure it out. I’ll make sure to pass your feedback along to the design team so we can look into improving the discoverability of the material parameters.
Out of curiosity, was the main blocker the Easy/Advanced UI mode switching, or was it simply that you didn’t think to check under Material Effects?
Best,
yeah it’s a different tiling on each side - I was experimenting for the OP to see how invisible you could make something via a PNG - hence why it was entirely blank. I noticed the other things as I did
Thank you for the clarification! I’ve passed the information along to the relevant members, and we can definitely look into improving the current UI and tooltips to make this clearer and easier to discover.