What gives an avatar opacity?

[Jennifer Boyle]

I thought I would make a ghostly avatar for Halloween, so I made a plain white texture with 128 transparency and applied it to all there areas of a skin and wore the skin. I was still opaque, so I tried it semi-transparent textures that were less opaque. Sill no luck. Finally, as an experiment, I tried a fully transparent texture. I still was opaque.

I had thought that the skin was like a coat of paint that made a transparent shape visible. From my experience, it's obvious that I don't understand how it works.

How does it work? What was I seeing when I was wearing a transparent skin?

Edited October 22, 2020 by Jennifer Boyle

[Chic Aeon]

If you put on a full alpha texture and you are not wearing a mesh body you should be invisible. I think there is an "invisible avatar" full alpha still in the viewer library. THEN your transparent garment should work -- at least it seems likely but to get the sheet or whatever to move with you  -- it would need to be rigged to the avatar skeleton.   I would suspect there are some already made on the Marketplace. 

[Ariel Vuissent]

The base avatar itself is more like a big gray blob of clay (that's the shape/"skeleton," basically an uncolored claymation character). The skin is the "paint" on top. You can't make that blob partially transparent; its either there, or it isn't. 

What you *can* do is slap on a full body/head alpha and make the whole darn thing disappear, invisibility cloak style. Then you add on whatever object you've purchased/made that is partially transparent. It can't be a texture applied directly to your avi, though, since your avi is now invisible; it has to be an attachable object. You can probably find "ghost" stuff on the marketplace. If you want to make your own, you'll need to learn how to make mesh or how to build with prims, if you don't know already. 

Edited October 22, 2020 by Ariel Vuissent

[Maitimo]

You have to use an alpha mask, not a trasnparent skin texture. And an alpha mask is masked, not blended, so you can't have it looking semi-transparent. At least, not with a classic avatar. It's either 100% opaque or 100% transparent, nothing inbetween.

You CAN do it with a mesh body, if it's fully modifyable (such as the Ruth 2 body) by applying your semi-transparent texture as a skin on the mesh body, and wearing a full alpha mask underneath it. You can't do it on a commercial mesh body that is modifyable only via a hud, unless you have the resources and skills to make an applier.

You can make mesh clothing appear semi-transparent IF it is modifyable, just by turning up the transparency in the Edit window.  Very few clothing makers allow this but some do. Full-perm mesh kits (intended for resellers) are useful for this sort of thing.

[Nalates Urriah]

Prims and avatars use different parts of the render process. Avatars are a special case using a dedicated part of the render system. That system renders the avatar or doesn't. The alpha textures/layers we add tells that system to render of not render. There is no semitransparent render. It is a binary 0 or 1.

The part of the system that handles prims allows degrees of transparency, 0.00 to 1.00 or 0 to 100 depending on how you want to think of it.

Unfortunately most body makers do not provide access to the transparency setting. If they did you could set the prim-mesh bodies to any level of transparency. Something that cannot be done with the Classic avatar body as it is non-prim.

 

[Blush Bravin]

If you have a Maitreya body there is a trick that might get you the results you're trying to achieve. To get this to work you will need to wear a full body alpha to make the skin disappear, then wear the clothing layer. Take the texture for the white transparent skin you made and make an applier for it. Then apply that to the clothing layer. Now the trick. Open the hud and turn on glow and set the degree of glow you desire using the slider on the HUD. Here in this pic you can see the effect. I have used a white pair of pantyhose as the applier and you can see that my legs are transparent and glow.  Getting your head to do the same thing may be the real trick. I have no idea if this is possible with a mesh head. 

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

Thanks to all who responded.

I wasn't trying to make a transparent avatar. When it first became possible years ago, I made a full body alpha just for the novelty of being transparent. I only tried a fully transparent skin to see what would happen after I didn't see what I expected with with partially transparent ones.

On 10/22/2020 at 11:05 AM, Blush Bravin said:

If you have a Maitreya body there is a trick that might get you the results you're trying to achieve. To get this to work you will need to wear a full body alpha to make the skin disappear, then wear the clothing layer. Take the texture for the white transparent skin you made and make an applier for it. Then apply that to the clothing layer. Now the trick. Open the hud and turn on glow and set the degree of glow you desire using the slider on the HUD. Here in this pic you can see the effect. I have used a white pair of pantyhose as the applier and you can see that my legs are transparent and glow.  Getting your head to do the same thing may be the real trick. I have no idea if this is possible with a mesh head.

This looks like it may be what I seek. I'll try it with a tattoo layer, since it includes the head.

On 10/22/2020 at 7:30 AM, Maitimo said:

You have to use an alpha mask, not a trasnparent skin texture. And an alpha mask is masked, not blended, so you can't have it looking semi-transparent. At least, not with a classic avatar. It's either 100% opaque or 100% transparent, nothing inbetween.

You CAN do it with a mesh body, if it's fully modifyable (such as the Ruth 2 body) by applying your semi-transparent texture as a skin on the mesh body, and wearing a full alpha mask underneath it. You can't do it on a commercial mesh body that is modifyable only via a hud, unless you have the resources and skills to make an applier.

You can make mesh clothing appear semi-transparent IF it is modifyable, just by turning up the transparency in the Edit window.  Very few clothing makers allow this but some do. Full-perm mesh kits (intended for resellers) are useful for this sort of thing.

I'll definitely try this if Blush's suggestion doesn't work.

[Jennifer Boyle]

I made progress, and I thought others might be interested.

I started with Blush's suggestion, and made Maitreya applier using the semi-transparent white texture. I applied it to a Maitrya tattoo layer. It gave me exactly the effect I sought. Then I made an applier for my Lelutka Simone head and for eyes using the same texture. Here is me wearing both tattoos:

I am, of course, wearing a full body alpha mask. Interestingly, it isn't necessary to wear the Maitreya body, and there is no change in appearance when i put it on or take it off.

There are still small pink areas at the inner corners of both eyes. I think I can get rid of them by experimenting with the eye applier more (I had no idea what some of the settings in it were.) There is an opaque box prim inside my head that is part of the head. I can't do anything about that. Too bad it wasn't transparent, which it just as well could've bee. At least there's no prim brain in there!

[Nalates Urriah]

Awesome!

[Jennifer Boyle]

I'm not quite there, as I thought I was. I did more or less solve the problem of the visible prim inside my head. I made a black sphere and attached it there, so, if I'm wearing my black hair, it is inconspicuous. I did not solve the problem with the pink inner corners of the eyes yet. I'm having a problem with the Lelutka eye applier---it detaches after a couple of seconds, so it's unusable.

The major problem is that parts of the avatar become fully transparent. Only the lower tattoo area is affected. Sometimes, the whole area becomes transparent. Other times, just parts do, but they always correspond to cuts on the alpha HUD. It can be precipitated by teleporting and by making areas either transparent or opaque using the HUD. The areas that become transparent, or stop being transparent, in respose to the HUD sometimes are not the same areas that the HUD changed. Sometimes the changes with the HUDF produce the expected result with no other change.

Here are some illustrative pics:

 

 

Any ideas? The only explanation that I can think of is a bug in the Maitreya HUD.