Problem with hair and eyelashes in Blender

Toasty3D

Hello all,
I recently tried Mixamo's Fuse and created a pretty good model from it that I liked. Everything was fine, I imported it into Blender and it looked great until I switched to "Materials mode" and it disappeared completely.

Also when I attempted to render, it came out like this:


So then I decided to import it into 3DS Max and then export it. Now it looks pretty good and renders well aside from the eyelashes and hair.

Here are some images as examples of what I'm talking about.
This is how the eyelashes look normally:


This is how they look while selected (looks good)


And this is what happens when I look at the eyelashes while it is in front of the hair:


Does any have some tips on how to fix this? I am pretty new to modeling and don't know where to begin.
I know that it probably has something to do with transparency and only being able to view a texture from one side of the geometry, but unsure on how to proceed to fixing it. Thanks!

Eric Chadwick

The bottom pic shows an alpha sorting error. Most real-time renderers (games, viewports, etc.) have this problem.

You can fix this by using software which uses better alpha rendering, like Marmoset's Toolbag (alpha-to-coverage).

Or if you're stuck with what you have, you can manually adjust the triangle order, by detaching and re-attaching the triangles in the order you want them to draw (back to front).

There's another issue here too, the solid lashes thing, in the first and third shots. Blender may be trying to switch to Alpha Test dynamically, when something is deselected. Alpha test renders faster than alpha blend, but is only on/off transparency. However, it's still sorting wrong with the hair, so there's something else going on here, maybe both alpha test and alpha blend or some other hybrid thing.

We have info on the subject here in the wiki:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Transparency_map

kat

Erics pretty much on the money, Blender switches draw type to save Scene rendering resources where transparency is concerned (especially as it has so many different ways to render the damn thing) - I don't recall if it's possible to 'fix' that by forcing Blender to render the higher quality transparency though (but check through File > User Preferences). With that said then, it's NOT and error or problem but rather a selection preference for rendering and resource usage (in the 3D View).

Toasty3D

Okay, thanks to both of you. Much appreciated : )