LE Horse Replacer - NiAlphaProperty Problem

[DServant]

I've been working on a hdt horse replacer and have encountered a problem getting the alpha to work on the tail/mane. I've copied the BSLightingShaderProperty & NiAlphaProperty straight from the vanilla horse.nif and made sure the UV maps are exactly the same, but for some strange reason, the transparency only works on certain areas of the mesh.

 

Here's the replacer nif and the original:

Dropbox Link

 

You can see that the very tip of the tail and the right side of the mane do have transparency, but the rest of the mesh doesn't. I know the vertex count on the tail/mane mesh is off by 4, I even created the nif again with fixed vertices so that they were exactly the same, and I still had the exact same problem.

 

Here's a screenshot of the two meshes with exactly the same number of vertices:

Pic

 

All I did was move around the vertices, this shouldn't affect the texturing at all. Even on the tail, where I haven't touched the vertices at all, the problem is just as bad. What is going on here?!

[Tamira]

1. You could as well remove the block #2 as your new horse obviously does not use it.

2. Block (NiTriShape) #2 was the only one with tangents and bitangents, the other 3 meshes don't have any. Right-click on every NiTriShape -->- -> mesh -> face normals and then -> mesh -> update tangent space

3. The transparency of the mane and tail is done by the vertex alpha.

Click on -> NiTriShapeData -> Vertex Colors on any line that does not read fffffff and you will notice a value for A (vertex alpha) that is not 1.000. So you only have to copy all the values of these vertex alpha to your new mesh. Have fun :D

Edited September 10, 2015 by Tamira

[DServant]

Thanks so much for the help, I hadn't considered vertices would also have alpha values too. That's a lot of vertices to change... at least I don't have to manually move each vertex from the old mane/tail to the new position, like I thought I might have to.

 

1. I think I need to leave it in because there are alternates textures for the other horse varieties, so the textures wouldn't be in the right order if I take it out. I'm just being safe an turning off the UV.