How to make FULL ALPHA HAIR ?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Might just be better to try to get LL to fix the alpha shading bug.

[Sari6t]

I know I am months late to this thread but when I forget what I'm about to share I will have a place to find it at the very least. : )

I've been fighting with making hair that works in SL as well for a few days, and thanks to the Covid thing, I've had time to test a zillion ways it doesn't work. Ok, enough rambling. 

1. No blended mesh combined with Alpha textures.

2. Alphas don't cross each other to avoid the blinking effect

3. Use hair cards, duplicate the most visible ones and flip the normals so you have TWO sided mesh hair cards

4. Cool trick... Lay out your hair, on the ends you want to have the Alpha edges, try to keep them from over lapping. THEN, slice those ends and make a separate mesh object. If that's clear what I mean is this. Imagine a hair card two polys wide and eight long. You have positioned the hair card on your Head, its unwrapped and you have positioned it on your hair texture so that most of the hair is sold texture but you have those nice flyaway ends that occupy the last 4 polys. Vertex rip and make them their own object. In Blender you click V and it rips the vertex for you.   Ok, now you have your hair, mesh strips that DON'T need to use BLEND, and the ones that do won't blink at you now. 

Hope that helps  : )

 

[Ardy Lay]

1 hour ago, Sari6t said:

I know I am months late to this thread but when I forget what I'm about to share I will have a place to find it at the very least. : )

I've been fighting with making hair that works in SL as well for a few days, and thanks to the Covid thing, I've had time to test a zillion ways it doesn't work. Ok, enough rambling. 

1. No blended mesh combined with Alpha textures.

2. Alphas don't cross each other to avoid the blinking effect

3. Use hair cards, duplicate the most visible ones and flip the normals so you have TWO sided mesh hair cards

4. Cool trick... Lay out your hair, on the ends you want to have the Alpha edges, try to keep them from over lapping. THEN, slice those ends and make a separate mesh object. If that's clear what I mean is this. Imagine a hair card two polys wide and eight long. You have positioned the hair card on your Head, its unwrapped and you have positioned it on your hair texture so that most of the hair is sold texture but you have those nice flyaway ends that occupy the last 4 polys. Vertex rip and make them their own object. In Blender you click V and it rips the vertex for you.   Ok, now you have your hair, mesh strips that DON'T need to use BLEND, and the ones that do won't blink at you now. 

Hope that helps  : )

 

Very good.  That's a rather effective effect method.

Alpha masked faces are masked per-pixel by the GPU when writing the output buffer using the depth of the faces at that pixel.  The order in which those faces is drawn is largely irrelevant.

Alpha blended faces are all drawn in their entirety using only ONE POINT on the face to determine the depth of the face in the buffer at the time the face is drawn.  Trying to do this PER PIXEL is gonna take a hell of a lot more time.  As the faces move, as in flexible hair, skirts, tails, etc, the draw order changes as the ONE POINT depth of the faces change.  This is not a bug, it's just the ugly results caused by using an effect, alpha blending, incorrectly.

Somebody will say I am wrong and will spout reasons and claim expertise to back their claims but I don't care.  Go write your own rendering engine.

Edited March 23, 2020 by Ardy Lay