Article Number: 96 | VC5 | VC4 | VC3 | Post Date: April 24, 2020 | Updated: June 12, 2021

Is it possible to change the opacity of my vehicle’s glass?

It’s easy to modify glass opacity in Virtual CRASH. Below we review two methods for doing so.

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Method 1 | VC5 Users | Modify glass material properties

Glass material pre-defined: If the vehicle already has glass material defined in the material menu, simply lower the opacity value. By enabling the “transparent” toggle, one can access the opacity slider. As the opacity is reduced in value, the object will appear more transparent. In the example below, tinted windows are created by using a transparent setting of 90%. See the User’s Guide (VC5) for more detail on material settings.

Glass material not pre-defined: (1) First switch to elements selection type (Shift+E). (2) Left-click on the windows. (3) Open the material menu, left-click “new”. Specify the glass material properties as needed. See the User’s Guide (VC5) for more detail on material settings.

METHOD 2 | VC4 and VC3 USERS | Adjusting opacity by MODIFYING THE SHADER FILE

First, navigate to Program Files (x86) > vizi > Virtual CRASH 4 > data. The file we’re looking for is default.shd. Note: before modifying the shader file, make a copy of the file in case you need to restore the file back to its original settings.

After making a copy of the default.shd file, open the file in Notepad and find the *SHADER “glass” group. This can most easily be accomplished by going to Edit > Find and using Notepad’s search feature.

The default glass settings are shown in the screenshot below. The settings we want to modify are also highlighted. After replacing the default values, make sure to go to File > Save to apply the settings. If you already have Virtual CRASH open, you’ll need to close it and reopen for the changes to take effect.

By changing the “DIFFUSE” values we can change the opacity of our vehicle’s glass. Below are some settings with the resulting outcome when the vehicle is rendered in Direct Light or Skylight within Virtual CRASH. Keep in mind that all vehicles in your scene will inherit the new changes, so if you have headlights that are ‘glass’ material, you may want to change them to ‘front light’ material.

*DIFFUSE 1.0 1.0 0.9 0.5; (this is the default setting)