Texturing issues

[Doobes]

Hey everyone! Long time listener, first time caller here.

Anyway, I'm dabbling in Age creation and I'm stuck on this one part. I'm trying to have a panorama of mountains wrap around my Age similar to the Sky dome.

I set things up just like the sky dome, but the image has an alpha layer so it's just the mountains themselves, if that makes a difference (alpha is turned on in the Textures window). Everything is exactly the same as the sky dome options-wise, UV mapped the image right, everything looks good in Blender, etc.

However, after export, the object, texture and all, simply isn't there. When normals are inside, I can't see the mountains, or anything of the smaller dome itself. However, if I set the normals to outside, I see the dome, but it's a solid color, same as I set for the material. No texture, no nada.

I was thinking of adding the mountains directly to the sky dome image, but that wouldn't look very realistic distance-wise, so any ideas on what I may be doing wrong?

I've also tried deleting the SAV file for my Age from my avatar's files, BTW.

[Jojon]

Nothing wrong I believe (I trust you mean the "use alpha" button in "Buttons->texture/map image" and not "Alpha" in "Buttons->shading/map to" [..which maps the actual image as transparancy]), but when we have transparent materials, for a reason that is not quite clear to me, we have to manually sort the order in which they are drawn, or we may not get quite what we expected.
This is (now [different earlier]) done on a per object basis, using the "PassIndex" property, that you can set in the "Buttons->Object/Object and links" tab. Objects with a lower passindex will be drawn first and then objects with higher passindex will be drawn on top, with the previously drawn stuff showing through where the latter is transparent.

So it may help, if you give your skydome a passindex of 0, the mountain range passindex 1 and then 2 for any other transparent object, that you can see the mountains through.

Hope that does it... :7

[Doobes]

Nope, didn't work. Found the passindex, Sky at 0, mountains at 1. And yes, used the "usealpha" key and not the one in "MapTo".

*shrugs* Hadn't tried the passindex thing, though, so thanks!

Any other ideas?

EDIT: Just in case, I should probably note that the object for the mountains is basically a ring circling my Age, if that makes a difference.

[Lontahv]

Try having "MapTo" be set to UV, and then type your UV layer in (if you don't know what your UVLayer name is... it's most likely "UVTex"--the default).

[Doobes]

Just tried that and still nothing, sad to say.

I'll keep tweaking it and see what I get. If there are any more ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

EDIT: I found the solution! When I created the mountain dome, I was on frame 800 in blender (I'd been playing around with animated water and forgot to set it back). So I deleted my mountain dome, set the frame back to 1, redid the dome as it was and presto! Mountains in the background of the Age!

Thanks Jojon and Lontahv for your help!