3ds Max - Tiling an alpha mapped texture - gaps?

Ghostscape

Ugh. What is causing this strange gap? This is the seam between two polygons where the image begins to tile.


I checked the UVs they are 0.0 and 1.0, there is no gap, and it only shows when it's displaying the mixed texture.

This is a 3ds Max Standard material.

Sage

The alpha channel needs to be seamless. Yours doesn't appear to be seamless so it doesn't tile. To test it copy the alpha into it's own layer and run the offset filter and rubber stamp or heal the seam out of it if there is one there.

Alex

Ghostscape

But it is seamless. You're looking at the same spot in all three images up there - the seam only appears when I have the diffuse and alpha together - as you can see in the alpha in the middle, it is seamless.

animatr

it doesnt look seamless...the right side of the alpha certainly doesnt seem to match the left.

Ghostscape

Those are all viewport screen grabs. The seam that shows up in the middle of the "Together" shot that has 3dsmax displaying my Diffuse and Alpha together has a seam in it. The seam disappears if I have it show just one map.

Does this make it more obvious as to what you're looking at?


This is driving me nuts

Sage

I just tried this and seem to work fine if you tile the map with bitmap options. Make your wall 1 x 4 and have the map tile 1 x 4 and see if there is a seam. I had a seam appear if I cloned the geometry and tried tiling it that way.

Alex

Ghostscape

Thanks!
I guess I'm going to have to do that - I was hoping to avoid it so I could move the verts around a bit and break up the repetition, but it looks like it's going to give me grief if mess with that.

Xenobond

This is only a viewport issue. If you render it, it should look just fine. If it is going into a game, it'll also look fine (unless your game somehow uses 3ds max for it's game engine ^_^).

Ghostscape

I'm not getting it to tile nicely using a single quad and tiling it in the texture options like you suggested, Sage, and using a strip of 4 quads with uvs going 0.0-0.25-0.50 etc, and tiling it in the texture options isn't working either. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I confirmed it is a viewport only issue, but I was planning on using it in viewport screengrabs because I've built an environment using Ben Cloward's DX9 shaders, and they have issues with z-sorting so I was hoping to kludge these over that environment.

Fun fun

Ghostscape

Actually the Z-sorting issues only happen when you try to stack transparencies - in any event it looks fine all in ben's shader. Here's a screencap:

Eric Chadwick

Looking good! Though I'd suggest toning down your ambient a bit.

The alpha seam is a problem with Max's D3D viewport renderer. The seams go away if you switch to OpenGL, and set transparency quality to Simple. But that might not be very helpful for your shader.