maya and alpha maps...

thomasp

so, is there a way to have a correct display of alpha mapped (masked) geometry in a maya viewport? for me, regardless of what i try (high quality rendering, playing around with hardware texture settings, different file formats, saving the alpha separately and whatnot), as soon as i connect the alpha map to the shader's transparency, the whole geo is displayed semi transparent with ugly artifacts.

there are lots of complaints in various forums and yet i found not a single working solution. does alias really have the balls to advertise their software as a games content creation tool when said package is unable to preview one of the most common effects in real-time?

i tried on different systems, btw - nvidia based gamer cards showed this behaviour, certified ati and sgi open gl boards made no difference. the technical maya staff at the company i work with cannot give solutions, too...

MoP

I heard that detaching the polys of the geometry you want to be alpha-mapped sometimes helps (although not completely).
Basically if your model is a head with hair, detach the hair polys to be a separate object while you're working on the alpha map. You might have to duplicate your shader and only apply the transparency to the detached polys.
Not ideal but it might help. It's a really sucky problem though, and it's been a "known bug" for many years, yet they haven't fixed it.

thomasp

well, it separates the creamy from the crappy looking parts, so to speak but else it doesn't change anything. luckily i only have to use maya for setting up my assets for export, so it's annoying but not a showstopper.

rooster

I can't offer a solution but I'd like to say I can't believe the cheek either.. mayas alpha sorting sucks hard. Really been pissing me off lately since I've been working with a lot of alpha stuff.

malcolm

I've been working with the alpha flicker for 7 years now, I doubt alias will ever fix the problem.

Jeff Parrott

What Mop is saying is the only way to go. Malcolm is right though, it's been an issue for as long as I can remember and I don't think there is an end in sight.