Transparent Transparency Woes

[Jinnywitha Cleanslate]

I am just decorating my club for an event in a few days time, and there are a lot of transparencies (curtains, venetian masks, and the like) in the club. 

I keep meaning to ask, but never used so many at once, and they mostly disappear once layered.  Is there a way to stop this happening, so all the layers in the decor can be seen and enjoyed?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Kelli May]

I believe that it's an issue with the way OpenGL deals with alphas, and something that can't be fixed in SL as things stand.

[Qie Niangao]

Surfaces that are intended to blend transparencies will have this "alpha sorting" problem, but if there are any partially-transparent surfaces that are, per pixel, all-opaque or all transparent, those can be made immune from the sorting problem by setting them to use "Alpha Masking" instead of "Alpha Blending" and then tweaking the threshold for what alpha level is to be rendered opaque. Be aware, however, that this minimal use of "Materials" causes Mesh accounting of Land Impact, so it's probably safest to first flip the object's physics to Convex Hull (or None).

[Suspiria Finucane]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Surfaces that are intended to blend transparencies will have this "alpha sorting" problem, but if there are any partially-transparent surfaces that are, per pixel, all-opaque or all transparent, those can be made immune from the sorting problem by setting them to use "Alpha Masking" instead of "Alpha Blending" and then tweaking the threshold for what alpha level is to be rendered opaque. Be aware, however, that this minimal use of "Materials" causes Mesh accounting of Land Impact, so it's probably safest to first flip the object's physics to Convex Hull (or None).

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Excellent Qie