I've been looking through some tutorials and videos and did a quick search through here (topic title, "glass"), and I can't seem to find a good "Yay/Nay" answer to something that's been bothering me for a while now.

What's the best method to creating an object that is translucent so that it's rendered realistically?

Some model examples,

A Body of Water - Say you have a model of a pool, and you want the rendering to look "right", i.e. show proper light refraction and so on (assuming that the renderer takes care of such things). My gut tells me that I can either create a solid block and apply half of the translucency percentage to opposite sides (so if the water was clear it might be 5% on top and 5% on the bottom to see the pool tiles, with a given that the water is 10% translucent), OR I can create a simple one-sided surface at the top of the water's depth and give it the 10% translucency (although this doesn't seem like it would correctly show refraction of light through the depth of the water).

A Glass Pane - Now my gut tells me that windows should never be just a single surface, so if I was to take transparency, thickness, and colour data from a source (say GJames for example as they're a major supplier in Australia), should I split the transparency of say 20% between the two clear faces I want to look through, so one is 10% and the other is 10%?

A Drinking Glass - I guess I would treat this the same as a glass pane, i.e. each side of the glass is a single pane, so a material of 20% translucency would be split on each side between the inside of the glass wall and the outside (but not split across the entire width of the glass because of the air gap).

@tig said:

The lb>kg conversion factor is 0.453592370000 so either x or / depending on the formula ?

Thanks for the quick reply. I don't have a problem using a multiplier/divider if I really have to, but I was hoping that there's just some flag or option somewhere to choose between metric or imperial weights (like there is for metric or imperial lengths).

I was just tooling around with building a library of dynamic components when I've seem to have run into a snag.

When I created a custom labelled attribute of "KilogramsPerMetre", value of "32" (minus quotes), and then set it to Viewable by User as a decimal value, kilograms, the Component Option Viewer spat out,

"14.515 kg"

Er, no, that's not right.

I've got Model Info set to Decimal -> Millimetres.

Every other value in the model and component is set to millimetres (or centimetres), yet I just can't find an option that differentiates between Pounds and Kilograms.

Is Sketchup hardcoded to Imperial weight units and so should I be using a multiplier in my attribute of KilogramsPerMetre to get it to display kilograms, OR is there a way to change the component's default weight to Kilograms (or grams preferably)?

FYI, I checked it was taking my 32 number as pounds by simply changing the display type to "Pounds (weight)" and 32 was exactly what it showed me.

Edit: Further FYI, I just went into my Mac's System Preferences and checked Language & Text -> Formats, just in case Sketchup was picking up on some sort of system level setting but that stuff is set to Metric as well (out of the options of Metric and US).