(Black Dragon) Eyes seem to have alpha. If one aspect of an item has Blending, the entire item is semi-transparent?

[LilithServil]

 

Am I missing something? I've recently switched from Firestorm to Black Dragon (better performance overall and has fun settings), and this is something I've noticed. It seems like if one piece of an item has a Blending mask, it acts like the ENTIRE thing is set to Blending or has alpha. For context, these Happy Paw head eyes have an overlay with a Blending mask-- the entire eye shouldn't be semi-transparent like this. It's a freshly unpacked head/eyes as well and it doesn't do this in Firestorm.

 

I've noticed it with other things too, like my friend's body having a blending layer on it = the entire avatar is semi transparent.

 

(Also this can be moved if need be, I wasn't sure if it should be under Avatar or Technical oops ^^;)

[Maitimo]

I've noticed this too. AFAIK the only fix is to switch the item to Masked instead of Blended. If it's no-mod, or otherwise looks awful in Masked mode, the only other solution is to return to Firestorm for that particular photo.

[LilithServil]

14 minutes ago, Maitimo said:

I've noticed this too. AFAIK the only fix is to switch the item to Masked instead of Blended. If it's no-mod, or otherwise looks awful in Masked mode, the only other solution is to return to Firestorm for that particular photo.

Ahh that's... Really awful. It does look pretty bad blended, and I use BD as my primary viewer, not really just as a photostudio... Having my eyes permanently ghosted isn't really ideal. It happens on other people too, hopefully it's something the Black Dragon creator can fix :s 

[Nalates Urriah]

1 hour ago, LilithServil said:

Ahh that's... Really awful. It does look pretty bad blended, and I use BD as my primary viewer, not really just as a photostudio... Having my eyes permanently ghosted isn't really ideal. It happens on other people too, hopefully it's something the Black Dragon creator can fix :s 

@NiranV Dean might fix it, if noticed. I've found that even with all I know about 3D rendering NiranV puts knowledge together in a different way then I do and comes up with interesting ideas and solutions. Fortunately for me, Niran usually already has a setting to fix whatever that I just didn't know how to use. So it is always a good idea to ask.

So in the forum you type @ followed by a space (space is optional) then the name to get a person's attention.

[NiranV Dean]

Good old alpha blending issue. Love it.

First things first. If one piece has alpha blending the entire object will not be blended, assuming you mean one prim out of multiple inside an object (linkset). Same goes for faces to some degree. If all of them use the same texture, they are all flagged as blended (by default) which if they overlap will cause this issue. However, both with faces and individual prims they can be individually set to either use blending, masking, emissive or none regardless of one another. I'm not sure about these eyes in particular but i'd assume they are not split into faces (one for the outside, one for pupil etc, you can check this by switching to face mode and swapping through faces via the menu, there's a face count in the object info display in your tools window) and they are obviously not made out of multiple pieces, killing these two options. This leaves only the hacky fallback option of turning back on Automatic Alpha Masking (Dragon - Develop - Rendering), it is disabled by default because since the introduction of materials it has done nothing good but give people the false impression that their content is properly designed (when as shown here) it clearly isn't. Lots of furniture, heads (sugarcult and kemono for instance) and other things use textures containing an unnecessary alpha channel, flagging the face as alpha which not only increases texture size, but also reduces performance (because the object is now rendered as alpha which is super slow) and has a lot of sorting issues (which aren't often immediately apparent) but will fail and break apart under many circumstances and can easily be distinguished by the absence of SSAO, wonky DoF interaction, pixelated shadows, weird light interaction and straight up weird or broken lighting. Automatic Alpha Masking usually does a decent job to mask these issues because not everyone runs around with shadows enabled (and often times entire buildings which house said furniture are in shadows, hiding the issue) but if you turn on Highlight Transparent you will see a lot of things in regions that are alpha which really shouldn't be.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

19 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I'm not sure about these eyes in particular

For what it's worth, those eyes are from Happy Paw and they do have at least two faces if I recall, though I don't remember if they're useful for this problem.

[NiranV Dean]

18 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

For what it's worth, those eyes are from Happy Paw and they do have at least two faces if I recall, though I don't remember if they're useful for this problem.

If one is the back (the eyeball or pupil) and the other the front (specular transparent face) then this would be as easy as setting the back to none and the front to alpha blend, this would also fix lighting and make the eyes immune to any possible alpha blending issues with glasses for instance

[LilithServil]

14 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

If one is the back (the eyeball or pupil) and the other the front (specular transparent face) then this would be as easy as setting the back to none and the front to alpha blend, this would also fix lighting and make the eyes immune to any possible alpha blending issues with glasses for instance

Problem is that's how the eyes are set up already-- the pupil/iris are the "core" and they're set to None, but there's an outer layer set to Blending. It doesn't seem to matter that the rest of the parts are set to None, because the top layer has Blending it's making the whole eye transparent. I've seen it happen with hair too that's otherwise fine on Firestorm, where just because it has a couple Blending strands it makes the entire hair like 50% opacity.

Edited March 29, 2022 by LilithServil

[Maitimo]

I've had the same issue with furniture, believe it or not. It all looks perfectly normal in Firestorm but in Black Dragon it's translucent because it's set to Alpha Blended texture (even though there's no actual transparency in the texture).  Switching it to None is an easy fix when it's mod. But I don't know why BD treats it differently from Firestorm.

 

[LilithServil]

2 hours ago, Maitimo said:

I've had the same issue with furniture, believe it or not. It all looks perfectly normal in Firestorm but in Black Dragon it's translucent because it's set to Alpha Blended texture (even though there's no actual transparency in the texture).  Switching it to None is an easy fix when it's mod. But I don't know why BD treats it differently from Firestorm.

 

Yeah I don't really understand the issue, it's bizarre. I know how Alpha Blending works (i.e alphas fighting, eyelashes with alpha clipping hair with alpha, etc etc) but an ENTIRE object turning semi-transparent because of a single face having alpha is abnormal. In Firestorm, hair would only have a couple alpha strands that'd have normal disappearing and alpha fighting issues. In Black Dragon though, even the parts set to None normally that SHOULD be solid are see-through because the item has other pieces that DO have alpha.

It's fine with stuff you can just set to None that shouldn't have alpha anyway, but something like these eyes that need the outer layer set to Alpha Blending or hair that needs Alpha Blending on some pieces can't just be set to None. xwx

[NiranV Dean]

On 3/29/2022 at 5:32 PM, LilithServil said:

Yeah I don't really understand the issue, it's bizarre. I know how Alpha Blending works (i.e alphas fighting, eyelashes with alpha clipping hair with alpha, etc etc) but an ENTIRE object turning semi-transparent because of a single face having alpha is abnormal. In Firestorm, hair would only have a couple alpha strands that'd have normal disappearing and alpha fighting issues. In Black Dragon though, even the parts set to None normally that SHOULD be solid are see-through because the item has other pieces that DO have alpha.

It's fine with stuff you can just set to None that shouldn't have alpha anyway, but something like these eyes that need the outer layer set to Alpha Blending or hair that needs Alpha Blending on some pieces can't just be set to None. xwx

Alright. If its already set up to be masking (assuming it is set up correctly) there are two things that could be happening here. For centuries SL has had this weird issue that sometimes the alpha mode is set wrong (corrupted) and defaults to alpha blend (because thats the default alpha mode) making objects that are not supposed to be blending use blending. This can usually be fixed by a relog but might require you to reattach (detach and reattach) the object in question. The other thing you might be seeing is that the object (your eyes) are fullbright (are they?) and you are using Volumetric Lighting (which will shine through your eyes. An indicator for this is that your eyes only seem to be alpha wherever they do not have your head as background (blocking volumetric lighting), every single picture you are showing your eyes in an angle where they are in front of either something far away or the sky, giving Volumetric Lighting enough space to be added and shine through from behind your eyes, you can use "Include alphas in depth" checkbox in the Depth of Field section to force alpha being "opaque" for Depth of Field and Volumetric Lighting (default SL behavior) or you can turn off Volumetric Lighting.
 

To be 100% sure what it is i'd have to see it inworld though, we could meet up inworld to have me take a look at whats is up with that.

Edited March 30, 2022 by NiranV Dean