Can I make part of my plugin to be transparent?

1

Hello,
is there any easy way with JUCE library to make part of my plugin editor to be transparent?
If yes could anyone give some advice how to do that?

I mean something like that:
image

For any help great thanks in advance.
Best Regards

2

This is not possible in an audio plugin, although it should be possible in a standalone application. There’s examples in the JUCE repo for displaying a translucent window (look at the WindowsDemo), and the technique for a transparent window will be similar.

3

Thanks for your help. I will check the examples which you’ve mentioned.

4

I definitely don’t have as much knowledge on the subject as reuk would, but I did recently work with some transparent windows. I think hypothetically you could actually do it, but you wouldn’t then be able to use any of the JUCE GUI features on top of it?

But I think you would have to do some deeper graphics/OS programming. Basically calling getWindowHandle on your editor, passing the HWND to a “Graphics” class of your own, and then using the Windows function like SetLayerWindowAtrributes which would allow you to set certain sections transparent based on the color you filled it with. This would be a lot of effort though and possibly a mess when it comes to the DAW trying to interact with the Window, but thats just my speculation.

5

The problem is that your editor window gets added to the hosts plugin window. So even if you do make your editor transparent, you’ll just see whatever background colour the host made it’s plugin window.

Also, on macOS and additional windows the plugin makes that are transparent now turn pink.

2 Likes