Solid transparent volume

[Frank Feijen]

Is there a way to create a shader for an object, that shows a transparent silhouet of the object? Just lowering the opacity shows all the details inside. I only want to see the silhouet, nothing inside, no shading, but transparent….

either with the standardrender or even better with octane

[Brian Jones]

if I understand your description turn off the Color and Reflectance channels and use Transparency – just set the color in transparency to something other than white, for only being visible with something behind it or with some Luminance to always see it – or a combo of Alpha and Luminance. That works as long as your object isn’t intersecting some other object or sitting on a floor or something, as long as there is a little separation it should work.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can do that by placing the Effects>Normal Direction shader in the Alpha channel and then use transparency to control the opacity of the object.

The normal direction shader simply hides the back faces of polygons (or front faces if inverted).