Transparent issue/question

[Rick]

I have a mesh that I paint a semi-transparent texture on. Depending on the camera angle sometimes I can see another semi-transparent image under it's "feet" and sometimes I can't. I was wondering why this would be? Also, is there a way to make it consistant? Make it so it doesn't matter where the camera is.

 

These 2 pictures show what I mean. This is what I get based on 2 different camera angles.

 

 

 

I would prefer the above. Even though it's more unrealistic I feel seeing through to the yellow ground effect drowns out the mesh to much.

[Michael Betke]

Yes the aboove looks better. The transparent material looks indeed unrealistic but the yellow is brighter so it doesnt look wrong. Maybe you take a tinted refractive material?

[Canardia]

You could also use Masterxilo's 3D OpenGL mode, and use a forward rendered transparent mesh.

The benefit is that they are really transparent, and even shadows and post-processing effects can be seen through them (doesn't work with LE's normal transparent meshes, since they are deferred rendered).

The bad thing is that they don't cast shadows, but often you don't even need shadows from transparent meshes.

[Rick]

So is what you are saying is that I can't get it to look consistent (I honestly don't care which look) with using just LE commands like this? I'm not concerned about shadows. I set castshadows=0 in the mat file and that fixed the shadow issue I was seeing. Now it's just this inconsistent look from different camera angles.

[Masterxilo]

Just put it in the transparency world.

Then it should always look like:

 

You could also use Masterxilo's 3D OpenGL mode, and use a forward rendered transparent mesh.

The benefit is that they are really transparent, and even shadows and post-processing effects can be seen through them (doesn't work with LE's normal transparent meshes, since they are deferred rendered).

The bad thing is that they don't cast shadows, but often you don't even need shadows from transparent meshes.

Rendering a transparent mesh as usually but in a transparency world rendered over the final image will result in the same without having to code the mesh rendering from scratch.

I'd only use ogl commands directly for helper lines or small, very dynamic meshes that don't require lighting and things like that.

[Rick]

Just put it in the transparency world.

 

This unit goes from non transparent to transparent any number of times. In fact all the units can be like this. I could probably create all my units in the transparency world and don't make them transparent until I need to, but since they would all be in the transparent world, doesn't that effect picking and/or physics? Would I have to change worlds when I'm expecting a unit to be picked vs say the terrain?

 

Also, I actually was wondering if I could get the other image. The one that doesn't really look correct because you can't see through the bottom part of the object, but that one looks better because the bottom part doesn't get overwhelmed by the yellow selection piece under it.

[Josh]

Make one copy in the main world and one copy in the transparency world, and hide and show them. If you need a pickable mesh, apply the invisible material to a mesh in the main world.

[Rick]

Yeah, I'll encapsulate all that into my unit class I guess so it's transparent, no pun intended.

[Masterxilo]

To get the effect of the second image (which was in your case just a depth sorting effect/error),

you'd put both the cube/unit and the marker to the transparency world, and render the cube solid.

You'd need to apply a simple "see the last rendered image through me" material/shader to the cube.