Reflection and Transparency

Unless a material is meant to be reflective or transparent, its Reflect setting should be set to 0 and Opacity set to 100.

If Transparency is off, in the render settings, transparent elements are rendered opaquely in that view.

Reflections and transparency are tinted by the Specular Color of the material. The degree of reflectivity also is modified by the Specular material property. For example, if Reflect is set to 90% and Specular is set to 40%, the material is only 36% reflective as, essentially, the two fields are multiplied together. The reflectivity is further modified by the Specular Color. In this case, the RGB values of the reflections are the products of the above (36% reflective) further multiplied by the respective RGB values (between 0 and 255) of the Specular Color. The same holds true for transparency (controlled by the Opacity setting).

Where there are no environment maps defined, a reflective object that does not see another object in its reflection will reflect the background color, as defined in the MicroStation color table. Thus, reflective objects will appear brighter when rendered with a white background than they would with a black background. Where environment maps are defined, and Environment Mapping is enabled, then these will be reflected in place of the background color. Any background image that may be defined for a view, however, is not reflected.

Note: Material definitions for older existing DGN files may have Reflect set to a value other than zero. This means that more objects may be reflective than intended, in a model, which can slow down rendering unnecessarily. Use the Material Editor dialog to ensure that the reflectivity of only those objects that are intended to be reflective is set to a value greater than zero.

Transparent Surface Elements and Refraction

When rendering a transparent surface (as opposed to a solid), if the element is defined in a clockwise order, transmitted rays bend as if they were leaving the element, as opposed to entering.

You can solve this problem by specifying a Thickness value for the material.

Other options are to use the reciprocal of the refraction value set for the element's material, or to reverse the surface normals using the Change Surface Normal tool ( Modeling > Surfaces > Surface Utilities > Change Surface > Normal ).

Glass Surfaces

To achieve a realistic glass surface, the Diffuse Color should be relatively low (for example, zero to 5). Clear glass actually is colorless (that is, its diffuse color is black, not white). Its Specular Color (the color of light that is reflected or transmitted) is white. Tinted glass can be obtained by modifying the specular color.