[Solved-ish]Alpha textures behind invisible mesh are invisible.

[Murgatroyd Zauberflote]

To make this easier I'll just describe exactly what I'm trying to do.  I have a pair of sculpted eyeballs.  The eyeball itself is one sculpt with no alpha channel on the texture.  The cornea is a second sculpt over the top of the eyeball which has an alpha channel, making it mostly transparent, but adds shine over the pupil.  (The effect is rather nice.)

Then I have a mesh head which I'm trying to add features to: blinking and emotions, done with multiple meshes that are turned visible/invisible when needed.

The problem I'm running into is that the cornea is made completely invisible by the invisible mesh in front of it, completely killing the effect.  On further investigation it seems that any mesh with transparency will kill any other texture with an alpha channel that happens to be behind it.  Is there any work-around for this?

[Chelsea Malibu]

Not really a work around unless you get away from anything that is alpha or set to transparent (as it creates an alpha channel).  Anytime you overlap the two, you will get that affect.   Turning something to transparent will do the same as using an alpha channel. 

What you will need to do is rig the mesh instead but it's hard to tell as I'm not clear on what you are working on. Can you post some images?

[Helium Loon]

Which viewer are you using, and specifically, which build of it?

 

The Shining-Fixes build from a few weeks ago had fixes for this.  I don't know if those have filtered out into the main viewer, but I know they were included in several other viewers already.  Firestorm (which I use) has them included in the 3.3 build.

 

[Maeve Balfour]

I know that meshes and textures with alpha channels don't tend to mix very well - although for flat things like windows/shadows requiring textures with alphas in the SAME mesh, the alpha glitching can be kept isolated via keeping said textures to a separate material. However, for meshes which are more than single flat planes (where you get surfaces "crossing over" depending on the angle of view), any kind of alpha tends to result in glitching.

About the only suggestion I can think of at the moment would be to incorporate your cornea shape into the actual head meshes themselves (for each iteration of blinking / emotions), and isolate its associated texture with alpha channel to its own material. By doing this, the alpha channel of the cornea won't affect the rest of the head mesh, and HOPEFULLY will still have the desired effect.

:matte-motes-smile:

EDIT: Helium's reply (posted while I was typing mine) probably makes my suggestion irrelevant (which is a good thing, mind you!)

:matte-motes-smile:

[Murgatroyd Zauberflote]

Thank you very much!  I was using Firestorm 3.2something.  3.3 fixes the problem beautifully.