nemesis wrote:
> 20 minutes?  You gotta be kidding!
> Blender > Help -> Manual -> Contents -> Materials -> Raytraced Transparency
>
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Properties/Raytraced_Transparency

> pretty quick and direct to the point.  If that doesn't suffice, google it.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't there back in February when I was looking for 
how to do this stuff. :-)

> So, there the enthusiastic guy can 
> see right in front of his eye a Mirror Trans panel with "Ray Mirror" or 
> "Ray Transp" options.

Yeah, because it's real clear what that means, and what object it has to be 
applied to. :-)  I think I spent most of those 20 minutes trying to figure 
out how to get shadows to cooperate with transparency. I had a transparent 
ball and a pitch-black shadow, and it took a long time to figure out the 
shadow adjustments had to be made to the floor, not the thing casting 
shadows.  Or something like that.  It was overall pretty frustrating.

>> why. And that's why I find blender unusable for even simple things. 
> 
> Well, you may find it unusable, but the Blender n00b made some 
> impressive animation with it all by himself.
> 
> Come to think about it, I've seen some broken but impressive Blender 
> physics simulation from you before, but nothing of povray.  Surely 
> povray is not that much more unusable, right?

I have a bunch of povray stuff. It's more interactive, so I didn't really 
post it anywhere. One bunch is up on sourceforge under the "LOME" project, 
for example.

POV-Ray is hard to use for reasons entirely beside the UI or documentation, 
but because of its inherent nature. :-)

>> Maybe I'll try ramping up again, one more time, just to see if I can 
>> model something simple I want to model.
> 
> Some people can only draw sticky figures no matter the pencil.

Yep. That's me. I shamelessly admit I have no talent along those lines. 
That's why I like architectural drawings - it's pretty easy to get a room to 
be square with any package. ;-)

> Complaining that the pencil is not as smooth as other pencil 
> will bring you nothing except headache.

I'm not complaining. I'm making observations. Complaining would imply I 
expected some result. :-)

> I don't see the difference behind too-many-stuff syndrome.  The fact 
> that neither of these Blender documents are physically local to your PC 
> is meaningless.

That wasn't what I was complaining about. For one, I suspect someone wrote a 
bunch of manual over the summer for Blender that wasn't there when I was 
playing with it before. (The whole "Summer of Documentation" effort sort of 
thing, you know.)

It's also probably, to some extent, the number of things that Blender can 
do. As I said, I got OK-comfortable with it after a while, just fiddling 
around with it. A lot of it was trying to get it to do stuff that's just 
broken, because that's the interesting part for me, since I don't really 
have a whole lot of artistic talent.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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