Line Drawn effect

I've stumbled across a method of displaying a wireframe
line drawn material with very unusual properties.

As you can see the material is transparent between the wires and shows a background image through it.

But it is opaque to itself, and you can't see the other object or the insides
of the object itself. Yet it shows the background color through it.

The only thing different between these first two images is the
background image of the suspension has been removed.

This image and the gif are not screen shots, they are actual rendered images.
Suspension bg.jpg
suspension_print.gif


Here's a screen shot of the objects.
Suspension 3q.jpg
Suspension mat.jpg
Suspension render tag.jpg
 
Other things to consider are setting the refraction to 1.
In the previous renders I had the Camera set to Orthographic, but it works as well in Perspective.
It also works with both the Falcon and Cheetah renderers.

Here's a demo showing how this is like backface culling for the renderer.

demo_1.gif
 
Using the Solid Shader is brilliant, although it only works this way in the Cheetah Renderer.
Which is fine because the Cheetah Renderer is awesomely fast for animation in this situation.

You get transparency with Color 0 set to zero opacity.

Solid Shader Panel.jpg
 
Here's a much simpler version.

Each shape only has an outer edge, no inner edges as any inner edge
would be twice as thick as an outer edge spoiling the clean look.

It takes some odd steps to get the shapes I wanted.
All parts are separate and arranged in layers.

I think it's so interesting that these polygons are transparent and opaque at the same time.

suspension-line-draw.gif

suspension-line-draw02.gif
 
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