[LSC] Transparent stickers and color 16

[Travis Cobbs]

On Jan 12, 2008 12:51 PM, Orion Pobursky <orion at ldraw.org> wrote:


> This sounds like a render/implementation problem and not a problem with

> the spec.  If transparent material isn't displaying correctly then

> either we need to define a better transparent color or the renderers

> need to be corrected to better display trans-white.  Unless you can give

> me concrete and visual examples that this issue is a problem with the

> spec and not with the renderer, I feel that the use of color 16 in this

> way is definitely non-standard, confusing, and should be avoided.

>


Due to the physics of the situation, the transparent part of stickers comes
out looking (almost) like it's not there at all when you stick it to a
surface.  There are two main reasons for this.  First of all, the stickers
are really thin.  Secondly, they're stuck firmly to the brick, with no air
gap behind them.  If you take a piece of clear LEGO, and put it right next
to another brick and look through it to the other brick, I don't think the
transparent LEGO will disappear in the same way that the transparent part of
a sticker disappears.

Because of this, I don't feel that it's a renderer issue.  The two materials
really do have fundamentally different properties, and we don't currently
have a way to model a clear sticker's properties in LDraw.

There's also a question of pragmatism.  If stickers look good using this
method, and can't be made to look good in any existing renderers using any
other method, the users of the LDraw library are going to want us to use
this method.

--Travis
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