Best shader solution for multiple overlapping alphas?

Tom Ellis

Does anyone have any recommendations as to the best shader for displaying multiple alphas overlapping in the Max viewport?

Ive been messing with some foliage meshes and haven't found an ideal solution. Maya displays them perfectly with 'High Quality' enabled, but I'm not as fluent with Maya and end up working very slowly in comparison to Max.

The shaders I have tried :

Xoliul's - by far my favourite in terms of visual quality, but I get sorting issues if too many alphas overlap. I have switched the boolean in the .fx file to show two sided which helps but doesn't entirely solve it.

Standard Max shader - handles overlapping alphas well but texture res inadequate until it's software rendered.

3Point - similar issues to Xoliuls.

Generally the meshes display ok in UDK, but its the display during creation that I want to improve.

I guess I should add that I'm assuming there are ways to help solve this with the way im creating the meshes maybe but I'm not too down with the tech side of things so advice on solving any of these issues would be good.

r_fletch_r

Its not the shaders that are at fault its how max handles sorting. There is a fix which I've seen people suggest but I havent tried it myself.
If you explode the alphas planes into seperate meshes and then combine them 1 by 1 in the order you want them to be displayed it should work.
Im not sure if you need to start from the front and work to the back, or the other way around.

Tom Ellis

Thanks Fletch,

Initially the meshes aren't attached. For example, when I'm massing out the tree canopy I'm just dragging out new copies of the planes, and I'm getting the errors.

Should they only be producing errors when they're attached?

r_fletch_r

Id imagine the error would come up there as well. Try duplicating the planes as elements of a mesh rather than as new nodes.

best to see if this works first, I've seen it suggested quite a few times but as i say I havent tired it. (I never seem to work with alphas)

Tom Ellis

Ok, your solution works perfectly thankyou. But now I have another issue.

It looks like a lighting thing, and possibly Max 2012 related. This is Xoliuls latest shader.

I've just installed Max 2012, first time using it after I got my copy a couple weeks ago and I'm not sure if this is related, but it's certainly new to me.

Please excuse the 'I made this in 2 minutes flat to test alpha's' branch I put together, but look at the black area on the lower branch triangle. It's only black when looking at the plane from certain angles. If you look at the other one closer to the camera, it's slightly lighter.

Any ideas?


Here's the alpha working ok...



and here's a shot of the problem:

r_fletch_r

no idea mate, dont use 2012. waiting for it to mature a bit