Distributer tool

[andylegate]

Not the actual physical size, actually. It's the amount of faces and verticies that cause the problem.

I broke up the surface where I had the clusters up in to 4 sections. Each section has less than 1000 faces now. Before, the entire mesh of that one corner had over 5000 faces.

It has something to do with that, and the angle. I can't explain it, but I've run into this problem time and time again. Camp Bravo, Zephyr Cove, Canyon, Bahvanin, and some other experimental Ages I've worked on.

[TheMagician]

When you messed around with the distributor tool did you also try out the wind and flexibility settings (to make plants move in the breeze)? I try to get this to work but it doesn't seem to have any effect. Perhaps that code was not in PotS but only in later versions?

[Aloys]

It was my ground. The ground meshes were way to big. I had to slice up the mesh. The moment I did, the chain link fence transparent textures stopped acting like X-Ray glasses.

I just tested this in Max....and sure enough! The transparencies are no longer doing it!!!!!

Could this be a case of Plasma sorting out transparencies by whole meshes rather than faces?

[andylegate]

I'm not sure Aloys.

In the case of using Blender and the Passindex in the Objects tab, we use that to give order to the transparencies when they get rendered. In that case (if you don't do it), if you lay one transparencies on top of another, the top transparency will allow you to see through the bottom transparancy, straight to the next textuture (IE< let's say you have a large puddle. Your ground in the puddle has a non-transparent texture, then you have your "water" texture that has transparent properties. If you then put ripples around the edges, that texture is also transparent, and when you look down through the ripples, the game engine seems to render the ripples texture, and the ground texture, but you don't see the water texture except where the ripples don't cover it. In Blender, we use Passindex to fix this and tell the ripples to render AFTER the water texture, and the problem goes away).

However, that's NOT the problem I was having. The problem I was having was a single transparent texture was rendering, and the game engine was not rendering anything behind it! That was if it was a large mesh with many, many faces (the mesh behind the transparent texture that is).

I had this problem with making Ages in Blender and the GoW plugin too. Sometimes it would only happen if the camera was looking at a specific angle, sometimes all the time.

The answer was, I had to break up the very large mesh that was behind the transparent texture, in to several smaller meshes (less faces). When I did that, the problem when away.
I thought for the longest time it had something to do with Blender or the GoW plugin. But when the exact samething happened with Max and Cyan's plugin, I realized that the problem must be something inherent to the game engine itself. There must be some upper threshold of the amount of faces a large mesh can have if a transparent texture is going to be in front of it.

When I look at Cyan's Ages in Blender, they don't use huge meshes very often, and when they do, they are normally low poly things. If you import the Cleft and take a look at the desert floor........wow, it's actually a ton of small meshes. Not one big plane or grid.

So for now, the rule of thumb for me anyway, is keep the terrain cut up, heh.