I’m having an issue with two overlapping transparent/glass planes.
The front plane has lower opacity (more transparent) , while the plane behind it has higher opacity (less transparent) .
When I view the two planes from the side, they appear to have their correct opacity. However, when I look through the front plane at the plane behind it , the opacity of the front plane seems to override the opacity of the rear plane. The rear plane becomes much more transparent than it should be.
It seems like D5 is not correctly combining the opacity of multiple transparent materials when they are viewed through one another.
Is this a limitation of the transparency system, or is there a setting/workaround that would allow both planes to maintain their individual opacity when viewed through each other?
This is a known limitation of D5’s transparency rendering system. When you look through multiple overlapping transparent surfaces, D5 does not currently perform full order-independent transparency with proper alpha accumulation across all layers.
As a result, the front-most transparent surface can dominate the blending calculation, and surfaces behind it appear more transparent than their actual opacity value would suggest. When you view each plane individually from the side, they render correctly because there’s no layering involved.
I suggest the following workaround for now:
Use the Glass material template with refraction/IOR instead of standard transparency.
Add Thickness to transparent surfaces to improve volume and layering behavior.
Increase the rear plane’s opacity to compensate for the opacity reduction caused by the front plane.