Alphas in Gmax

Lord McMutton · Aug 2008

How does one go about doing this? I tried adding the opacity option in the material, and the alphas appear correctly, but the object they're on becomes partially transparent. The texture on the model is a .TGA with an alpha channel.

ivars · Aug 2008

it's a sorting problem. Look up alpha sorting, I'm sure there's a long thread about it somewhere.

Mark Dygert · Aug 2008

Make sure you put the tga also in the opacity slot, and check on alpha (not RGB Intensity) in the Bitmap Parameters > Mono Channel Output. Do this in the opacity slot not the diffuse, leave the diffuse at RGB.

Outside of making sure the materials are correctly setup, you're stuck working with what is 3dsmax4 without a render feature. There have been huge improvements to the viewport and how it handles transparencies, since then.

Lord McMutton · Aug 2008

The parts on his hair that are black are where the alphas are:

Is Gmax unable to display alphas as transparent?

Mark Dygert · Aug 2008

If you right click the viewport title "perspective" if there is a "transparencies" option you can adjust it to simple or best. If its not there, then more then likely it was added into a newer version of 3dsmax and doesn't support transparencies in the view port =/

One other thing you can try is make sure that the transparency map is enabled in the material.

Lord McMutton · Aug 2008

No, it's not there. Oh well. Thanks for your help, guys.

Michael Knubben · Aug 2008

You could always just preview it in Xnormal, to see what it looks like in realtime.

Alphas in Gmax

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