I know this has probably been covered but I've read the tutorials and can't find an answer for this one.

I was just wondering how you make an object sheer, but not invisible. For instance, I'm meshing a cover for the birdcage. I'm making recolors of it but I wanted one of them to be sheer so you can still see the bird haha.

Do I just have to make a recolor with like 50 percent opacity, or is there something within the package files I need to edit?

There are really three different ways to handle opacity in objects. Each one has cases it's better suited to, and cases which are worse.

Yes, you can just make a blend recolour with 50% opacity. There are some downsides to that though. Objects which overlap themselves (like curtains, or drinking glasses, where you can see through two layers of the same thing at once) behave very poorly with this technique. They also don't look so good when zoomed right out.

You can use the TXMT opacity parameters (from memory it's "stdMatUntexturedDiffAlpha" that you need to look at). These handle objects like curtains and drinking glasses fine, and look good when zoomed out. However, they apply uniformly across the entire subset, so you can't have part of the subset fully opaque and another part translucent. (You can have different subsets with different opacities, if you so desire)

The last option is for cutouts. These can share the same subset and still work on overlapping objects, but each pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque.

Thanks Echo, your reply was really helpful!