Transparency through a crown

jason-2455927

I just created a crown in blender and saved the obj to use in daz studio. My thought was to make a basic cylinder and simply inset the top and bottom to bridge the center out. Then I was going to photoshop the uv map making a transparency map basically cut out the design of the crown. This was because I felt I could keep the polygons low that way. Everything went fine BUT since the crown has a thickness to it rather than just being a one sided plane the transparency cuts out the area only to reveal the crown is hollow. Is there a way to make a transparency map for an item with thickness that doesn't just show the inside of the object? Because right now it's like cutting a hole through a hollow wall and if you look at it from an angle you can see inside the wall.

Richard Haseltine

In 3delight you might be able to use displacement to close the edges, but the limited vertex count for displacement in Iray renders that impractical (and anyway, since the vertices are sent over as data that would immediately undo the low-polygonness). In any event, the opacity map has to be sent over and there is an overhead for transparency mapped areas as iray/3deligth both have to work out whether the area is having an effect on the pixels. All in, I think modelling - as long as you didn't go overboard trying to smooth the curves - would be less resource-intensive than trying to cut down the actual polygons in favour of mapped manipulations.