Set Viewport Transparency Level for Xray/See-Through Objects

[dswahn]

When working with very dense scenes with a lot of overlapping objects it can still be difficult to see objects not being in Xray mode. A further reduction in transparency would be needed.

I suggest that the user should be able to specify what transparency level the Xray mode should be in.

Although the Visibility track can be changed to further reduce the transparency level of Xray'ed objects, the Visibility track should be treated as an independent component of object. The Visibility Track might contain keyframes that needs to remain untouched, and so on. Also, setting the Visibility Track on many objects is slow an tedious.

An independent setting to globally set how transparent the Xray/See-Through mode should in the viewport would be ideal.

Here is an example of a teapot with five hollow cubes surrounding it. All cubes have been set to Xray mode, yet it is kind of hard to make out the exact shape of the teapot.

Here is the same scene, except that the Visibility track has been set to 0.1 for each surrounding cube. With this visual setup it is much easier to see the actual teapot, but still get a sense of the surrounding cubes.

Conclusion: It would be very beneficial to be able to set the transparency level of the Xray/See-Through mode independently from the Visibility track so that the Visibility track can remain untouched if more transparency is needed.

[Kranos_Orphydian]

how are the other software dealing with this?

[dswahn]

Not really sure @Kranos_Orphydian. But I just think this is just a matter of simple multiplication.
The visibility track can act as a per-object multiplier of the transparency you get from the Xray mode.

A global Xray transparency level would simply add a multiplicator on top of the standard Xray transparency level + Visibility track, but this global multiplier should only kick in for objects where Xray mode is activated.

[Kranos_Orphydian]

From what I understand there was/is a really big discussion and maybe even some changes coming to Blender for how to deal with these. Check the Blender development site.

X-Ray selection experiments build - Archived: Other Development Topics / User Feedback - Developer F...

[dswahn]

To me this isn't much of a discussion how users would like it to be @Kranos_Orphydian. Let's say this system is implemented, if the global transparency multiplier is 1.0 by default it means users will not experience any difference until the user changes, in other words, those who do not need to change anything will not experience any difference.

The question might be whether the setting should be a per-scene setting or a global value that will be the same for all scenes. I imagine that depending on your scene content different transparency levels might be needed, hence why a per-scene setting seems most intuitive.

A new scene would simply adopt the 1.0 multiplier (original look) until the user changes it.

Another question then would be where the parameter to change the transparency multiplier would sit.

The Preferences window would be the best since it does contain per-scene parameters like gamma settings/colour management. A transparency multiplier could simply be picked up in the same way.  

[Kranos_Orphydian]

bump for this!