Alpha issues

[Karina Leborski]

Bought this gorgeous hair from DOUX ...and THAT happens... I wear also hairbase. It looks normally sometimes, but most of the time it's like this

Can anything be done? Thanks!

[Mousy Littlepaws]

I get that with that hair too. Just remove the hair base on your head. You don't need it  since Doux hair has like a built in hair base.

[Nalates Urriah]

There are transparent layers causing problems. Katt's suggest is the usual solution. 

If your head's HUD allows you change blend modes, play with that.

[Janet Voxel]

Or you can remove the baby hairs on the hud.

the baby hairs are modeled into the hair, which is great if you don’t like futzing with hairbases. But if you do or you want to wear one, you can by just turning the baby hairs off on the hud.

[kiramanell]

6 hours ago, Karina Leborski said:

Bought this gorgeous hair from DOUX ...and THAT happens... I wear also hairbase. It looks normally sometimes, but most of the time it's like this

Can anything be done? Thanks!

 

 

This is a known, and inherently unsolvable, alpha sorting problem, which occurs when 2 or more alpha-layers are overlapping. You'd think the renderer knows the order, and it does; but, sadly, the alpha sorting takes place at much lower (video driver) level, where the proper order can no longer be determined. You'd get the same effect, for instance, when putting your glasses on a glass table in SL. Or with add-on eye-lashes.

This is not just an SL thing, btw: even the most modern of games suffer from the same issue. The only way to avoid it, is to simply ensure you are never putting 2 alpha layers on top of each other. If the hairbase uses alpha layers, just remove it (only if it's copy, of course). My Catwa head, iirc, can indeed, as Natales suggested, set (to a degree) the blend mode of certain parts. Just play with it.

[Ardy Lay]

I would amend this explanation by putting 'blending" after 'alpha' in the body of the text

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.

[Maitimo]

One thing you can do if you still want to use a separate hairbase under the Doux hair is to use a BOM hairbase instead of using the hairbase layer on your head. If you have a Catwa head, all the built in hairbases are now also supplied as BOM layers as well. Or you can use a third-party hairbase from elsewhere. Of course this will mean having to switch to a BOM skin as well, of you haven't already done so.

[Marianne Little]

BOM takes away the alpha sorting issue. Look in the hairbase folder for tattoo layers. The symbol is a pink squiggle. BUT to use BOM, you must wear the head with a skin made for BOM and turn on BOM on the head's HUD.

One of the main reasons I went over to BOM, was to get rid of all alpha sorting issues. On the body too.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Marianne Little
Removed a sentence bc it was wrong

[Karina Leborski]

On 5/21/2020 at 3:34 PM, Maitimo said:

One thing you can do if you still want to use a separate hairbase under the Doux hair is to use a BOM hairbase instead of using the hairbase layer on your head. If you have a Catwa head, all the built in hairbases are now also supplied as BOM layers as well. Or you can use a third-party hairbase from elsewhere. Of course this will mean having to switch to a BOM skin as well, of you haven't already done so.

You are a lifesaver!! Bought a BOM hair base and forgot all my troubles! Thanks!