Making Part of a mesh Transparent?

[TheRegular]

Hi, as you all know since SL has been introduced to mesh, there isn't much variety being that many people don't know how to create their own mesh or like I, just havn't mastered it yet. So I was wondering if it would be possible to make parts of a rigged mesh transparent without any glitches, just to add my own creativity to it for some variety. Is there a way of doing this successfully? Can it be done successfully?

[Dilbert Dilweg]

That is an interesting question. I wonder if you could flip the normals of faces and still weight them and weight paint them and they still take on the proper weights. I have never tried it. As you know a flipped normal will be invisible. But I am not sure how the direction of animation would react,

The other main method would be to use alpha textures on the areas you want invisible.  But you also run into an issue of alpha sorting in Sl. If you have an alpha mask for the body and alpha layers for the mesh texture. it could look a little freaky.

[TheRegular]

Thanks for your reply, but it's not the actual build of the mesh that I'm concerned with. I want to texture parts of a full perm mesh that I've purchased to make certain parts transparent to slightly change the overall look of the mesh

[Dilbert Dilweg]

I see. only a mesh kit... Any type of texturing the mesh will not interfere with any rigging. Like I stated above the issues you may run in to is the alpha sorting. If the mesh item needs an alpha mask to to hide the avatar body and then you use textures with alpha layers for tranparency  then you can run in to blending problems. "alpha sorting"

You can always try it and test it in world on the beta grid. The other issues are would be how the movement reacts and how you place the textures. You can upload for free on the beta grid for testing to see how it works out  .

[TheRegular]

Okay, Thank you for your help! :-]