Tranceparancies Question......

[andylegate]

Okay, got a dosey of a question here.......

I've got this long chainlink fence. Now to make it, I put in planes, UV Mapped one side with the chainlink.png file that I have. then created a duplicate plane facing 180 out on the other side. Tah-dah! Chain Link fence that you can see through!, but not walk through.

Okay, now here is the problem. When I get up close, I can see through the fence, and of course see the chainlink. Yet when I back away, the fence starts to act like a X-Ray window, allowing you to see through the ground on the other side!

I've racked my brain over this, and I'm not sure what would cause that. I'm starting to think I'll have to do away with the chain link and create a different kind of fence. I tried some barbwire, but that made it even worse! Even close up, when you look through the fence, you can see straight through the ground!

Any suggestions?

PS. The ground is a grid plane.

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Andy: on the texture panel in Blender, did you toggle on the UseAlpha button? That's how the new plugin recognizes that your texture has alpha components in it and puts it in the appropriate drawable spans.

[andylegate]

No, because I didn't give it a texture. Simply gave it a material, set the color to white, the specular to 0, amb to 0.5, and then UV mapped it with my transparent image.

So, you're saying that to use transparencies correctly, we have to give them a texture too?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

AFAIK, yes. In general, it's good practice to create a Blender texture to go along with your UV mapped faces, so that you can have fine-tooth control over texture settings, as mentioned in Kato's post here.

[andylegate]

Well that did cure it! No more X-Ray fence!

I try not to include image textures as the last time I did it with the new plug in, everything ended up looking smeared, or stretched, and I really didn't feel like having to retexture the entire Age!, it's not as big as Minkata, but It's about the size of Tsogal or Delin.

I'll have to remember this. Thanks Robert.

Now, if I could just figure out my sound problem.......

[Nadnerb]

The "smearing" was a result of the plugin reading the "Orco" values because "Orco" was selected in the map input settings of the material. Changing that setting to "UV" would have fixed everything.

That didn't happen this time because that "feature" was removed.