Stenciling problem SOLVED

[Doobes]

Hey everyone. Long time no post.

Anyway, I got back to working on my Age again, tweaking various things. I decided to redo some of my stencils that worked wonderful before...until now. I've tried everything I can think of, and most of the meshes that had these stencils applied are now almost all black with an odd shine to it. Check this out:

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What makes it more confusing is that one part of the mesh still works perfectly:

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Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I'll bet it's something REALLY simple.

EDIT: I should note I'm still using Blender 2.49b and PyPRP 1.

[Aloys]

I'm no stencil specialist but it could be a number of things. A couple idea that comes to mind:
I know it's an obvious question, but: were these screenshots made in Blender or Uru? Stencils don't appear properly in Blender

First of all: You say "most of the meshes that had these stencils". Most but not all of them? What is different with those that work? Find what is different and that should answer your problem.

About those that don't work:
Have you changed your material colors to black or something dark?
Have you changed your vertex painting color to black?
Have you changed your UV mappings?
Have you renamed or changed of path your textures?
What is different on that part of that mesh that works? Is the stencil texture different here? Is the UV mapping different?

That stencil issue aside, that area of your age seem to look nice.

[Doobes]

Thanks for the quick response, Aloys!

These screens are from URU itself. It's the weirdest thing because everything worked fine before. The only thing I modified were the textures that make up the stencil itself (black and white). Everything else is still the same. The only thing I can think of was that I hit a button or something and now all but a few faces are not working properly. From the look of it, the alpha of the first stencil is working perfectly...it's just the grass texture that's supposed to come through is coming through black for whatever reason now. I've tried everything I can think of (TwoSide, Shadeless, etc.) and I'm at a loss. Nothing came up when comparing the faces that worked and the ones that didn't, either. Flipping normals did nothing as well.

Any other ideas?

[Aloys]

I'm afraid I don't have any ideas right now.. What is really weird is that part of the mesh works fine.. That's why I was thinking of maybe a change in your UV mapping; but you say it's not the case; so I'm not sure what could be wrong.
But again, the last time I used stenciling in Plasma / Blender must have been over two years ago; heh.
That's a very random idea but: could it be a lighting issue? Have you assigned specific lights to these objects?

[dendwaler]

Are these settings correct?

no RGB has to be activated

also the button "CalcAlpha " if the stencil is a jpg, otherwise only the white part of the stencil will be visible in color , only 1 of the 2 involved layers.

[Doobes]

Those are indeed correct. As the pictures show, a small section of the mesh is still stenciled perfectly. That's what's so confusing about it.

[Aloys]

The fact that only part of the mesh works seems to indicate that the problem doesn't come from the material, or any other object-wide settings.
So again; it must be something more 'local'; but you say that you've already toured all the usual suspects..So, as far as I'm concerned I'm out of ideas.
Unless anybody else as an idea; the only thing I can suggest you is to post a Blend file with the objects in question for people to look at it.

[dendwaler]

Two more things you can try.

The path to the textures might be "forgotten" by Blender.
you don't always get a message when:
1)The texture still is present in the tex-cache in the "dat"directory. So delete (or mov) the texcache to get a complete export again.
2) In case of materials consisting of multiple textures.You don't get an error message if only one path of the complete texture set is correct.
So newly fill the correct path for every texture of the material as you would do when texturing a new object.
See what happens with that object, if its alright now, you have to do it for all the objects or make sure you have a relative path to them.

Thats all i can imagine.

[Doobes]

That's exactly what I did, deleting TexCache items and all. Still no luck and the small part of the mesh still came out correct with the rest black. I'm in the process of deleting and recreating the grass mesh, which was faces duplicated and separated from the first ground layer of the Age. Then I am going to redo the material from the beginning with each texture. We'll see how this goes...

EDIT: Success! That did the trick! Must have been something screwy in the bad mesh. Thank you all for the advice, I appreciate it.

[Aloys]

Glad you got your problem fixed.
(now we won't know what was wrong, but at least it is fixed. )