Doing a project for my architecture studio in steel construction this semester. I need a metal grate that kind of clangs when you walk on it like in a catwalk. Haven’t been able to find transparent enscape materials, as well as no luck with hatches. I have done it by hand thus far and the final look (attached below in enscape view) is exactly what I want, however, now my file is 600+ mb and I figure there has to be an easier way to do this. Let me know if theres a way to use meshes or anything here.
If your aim to just create a visual feel of something like this, I’d suggest to use a texture with holes than trying to model this.
Just using a texture would be much lighter and more helpful.
You would have to do some photoshop for this. I don’t think it’s easy to get téxtures like this.
Or you could try making one of these units as a block so that you can replicate that.
Texture with alpha channel will work.
This might work:
1 Like
Thank you that helped a lot. I just can’t get it to show up perforated in enscape.
Correct, jpgs do not have alpha. Use PNG.
is that why it’s not working in enscape?
Very possible. Although I do not know the exact kind and outs of Escape.
PNGs are a better format in that they are more modern, contain RGBA, and are compressed.
Hi @Jake_Pulciani , you may need to go to the Enscape Material Editor, find that material and navigate down to the Transparency drop down button and choose Cut-Out and then choose your black and white image to act as a clipping mask. White pixels will be 100% opaque and black pixels will be completely transparent. You can also choose Invert button to flip that logic.
Usually this is handled automatically by a .PNG with transparency but sometimes it needs a helping hand or you may desire .more nuanced control over your alpha channel 
Hope that helps!
I made the texture a PNG and just applied it as custom material and it worked fine. Thanks everyone for the help
2 Likes