Issue with transparency

[FrenchieDwemer]

Hi all,

 

I have this sword where I want the handle and blade to use different cubemaps (bronze-ish for the handle & a steely one for the blade). The obvious solution would be to split them into separate parts, but I don't have the tools or know-how to tinker with the actual model. Besides the handguard and blade are part of a single contiguous mesh and there isn't a well-defined limit between them.

What I did instead was duplicate the sword in NifSkope and assign a NiAlphaProperty to both resulting NiTriShapes (flags set at 4844 and threshold at 128). Then I made two separate diffuses, one for the handle and one for the blade - with the remainder removed (+ the corresponding alpha maps ofc).

Hence I end up with two copies of the same NiTriShape in that .nif, but one uses a diffuse that makes the handle transparent - and the other one a diffuse that hides the blade. See the enclosed screenshot in BladeHandleSeparate.rar for an illustration.

Trouble is, on their own, both "parts" work as intended, but when they are superposed, the handle goes black (in game that is; it looks fine in NifSkope and, for that matter, in the Creation Kit). It actually looks ok in my inventory but not on my character or on the ground. It looks like the "blade" NiTriShape is overshadowing the handle even though it should be invisible down there.

If I reverse the order of the NiTriShapes, the opposite happens. The blade appears black.

I tried making .nif's with either the handle or the blade alone, and they show up just fine in-game. I even made one with both parts but side by side instead of superposed, and again, they're both fine. It's when you put them together, one on top of the other, that the transparency "fails" all of a sudden.

I tried messing around with the NiAlphaProperty's but that led nowhere.

I'd highly appreciate some input here. Could it have something to do with the textures themselves ?

As a sidenote this is a .nif I'm trying to port from Oldrim. Works perfectly fine in there.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[scorrp10]

If you have BodySlide + OutfitStudio installed, you can very easily split the sword there, without all of those transparency shenanigans.

 

Open OutfitStudio. (Consider watching some tutorial videos about using it)

File - Import - from NIF. Select your file. If it is an Oldrim mesh, it will ask you if you want to optimize it - choose yes.

You will need to duplicate the sword mesh , rename duplicate 'hilt'. On the sword, mask the blade, and use 'delete vertices'. On the hilt - the opposite.

You can also go into mesh properties right there to change the textures used by the hilt and blade.

Once done, use File - Export - To NIF - to save the edited file.

[FrenchieDwemer]

Well that did it. Thank you very much for your help, that was pretty straight forward indeed.

 

Though, I'm still interested if anybody has a solution for the transparency thing. I do have a couple other models that rely on the same kind of trick and for which deleting vertices won't do - armors with gilded decorations, stuff like that. Details that I can't so easily separate like a hilt from a blade.