Opacity in 3dsmax turning entire mesh translucent

wahtye

Hey,
so basically I've got the following problem in 3dsmax as well as the UDK.

While creating hairplanes in 3dsmax and loading in an opacity map, the entire mesh turned translucent, and I was able to see the underlying geometry, although its associated texture was entirely white.


The bitmap was plugged directly into the opacity slot, without any gamma corrections added.
The mesh consists of only singlesided planes.

Here's an image to help you understand the problem:



I kind of feel lost, as in my understanding a value of 255 / 255 /255 in an opacity map should represent full visibility.
Appreciating any help.

poopipe

maxs depth sorting isn't that clever im afraid

use a shader that alpha tests . i think xoliuil does it

Ace-Angel

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CreatingHairUsingAlpha.html

wahtye

Thanks for the help.

Kinda sucks on the 3dsmax part, but I guess as long as there's a fix for it in UDK it doesn't really matter that much.

Mark Dygert

I think there is a way to fix it in max, if you detach all of the elements and then add them in order from innermost to outermost they will sort correctly, but most people don't bother and just work around it because engines handle it correctly.

poopipe

up. max sorts alpha blended objects according to order of creation so that does work.

Hazardous

if all you want to see is that your alpha is looking nice, just us a pure diffuse only material ( no normals or other maps ).

Create a blinn and set it to self illumination 100 and apply that - perfect sorting every time in max, even works with 8 bit soft alpha.

Here:



Forgot to write on step 4 *click show in viewport*

Note that this doesnt work when you start applying normal maps etc.

Also note that my TGA for the hair RGB channels are all black save the alpha channel which is where my opacity map is ( which is why I had to do step 3 )

Hope that helps