Building is see-through (z-buffer?)

Violet

Having a problem with transferring a simple building into UDK.

The building is fine, until I put on the material:



It's a simple 2048 TGA bitmap - I removed the alpha channel and made it's own alpha channel bitmap file.

It is visible like this with the blend mode set to blend_translucent.



This is what it's supposed to look like in it's absolute base form (with no alphas):



Solid:




Material with alpha working on sphere:



and not:



"In-game":



I've got loads of stuff with alphas and need to get some understanding why it's doing this? I've not used UDK before, any help greatly appreciated.

m4dcow

Looks like some type of sorting error, try the blend masked or blend soft masked modes for the material.

Another possibility would be to make the object a multi sub material, where you apply a translucent shader only to the parts that need it and the rest would be a regular opaque material.

cholden

m4dcow wrote: »

make the object a multi sub material, where you apply a translucent shader only to the parts that need it and the rest would be a regular opaque material.

This would probably be the best solution.

Violet

I tried numerous other blending options, but they all do the same thing with alpha channel!
Also tried to re-export in FBX (1st was AIS). Confused!

Is this a common problem with 'complex' static meshes?

sprunghunt

Violet wrote: »

I tried numerous other blending options, but they all do the same thing with alpha channel!
Also tried to re-export in FBX (1st was AIS). Confused!

Is this a common problem with 'complex' static meshes?

It is not a normal thing to apply a translucent object to a whole building like you have there. Sorting errors do happen to translucent objects but normally it doesn't matter because the object is much smaller.

I would suggest you follow the advice of m4dcow and make separate material IDs for the parts you want to be transparent.

Violet

I tried the method described above and it worked perfectly! Thank you all!

I applied two (four in the window) separate materials, one with no alpha (for building and assets), and the other with alpha using blend_translucent (for alpha details and windows). And then applied each to the relevant material ID in the model.

In Max, each Multi-sub material needs a bitmap assigned and a text descriptor, otherwise it won't show in the 'static mesh editor':



(I missed one alpha'd polygon under the window).



Thanks once again!!!