Nif/material transparency problem

[mazakala]

With transparency now being controlled by three things, the mesh, the texture and the material file, I'm bashing my head against a wall here. What I want is a smooth gradient from opaque to fully transparent, but what I'm getting is either fully transparent or transparency cut off at certain value.

 

Nif file flags are 4844 with 128 threshold

Material file has blend mode:unknown, test ref: 127, Alpha test and both Z buffer boxes ticked.

.dds looks like it's supposed to, saved in DXT5 and alpha channel looks good.

 

I've never been good at this, tell me what I'm doing wrong.

I know these kinds of things get asked a lot, but I've tried to follow tutorials and it hasn't solved the problem.

[TrickyVein]

Those flags will *always* cut off transparency at a certain threshold.

 

That's because they're actually meaningful for alpha blending. Click on the flag icon in NifSkope to view what they actually mean.

[mazakala]

Those flags will *always* cut off transparency at a certain threshold.

 

That's because they're actually meaningful for alpha blending. Click on the flag icon in NifSkope to view what they actually mean.

I'm not an idiot, I know what they mean. I just don't what all of the values actually do. As I've said, what I want is an alpha gradient as per texture. I've now changed the flags to 4332 (Scr Alpha, inv scr alpha, greater, no testing, threshold 128, if you must know), since I read that Enable testing kills gradients. I also unticked alpha test in the material editor. The problem still persist. Depending on what I change, I get No gradient, just a clean edge between fully transparent and fully opaque or alternatively the thing is completely invisible or has no transparency at all. I've managed this several times in the past, modding Skyrim and Oblivion, but I forget things. I feel like I'm getting close...

Edited May 10, 2016 by mazakala

[matzman666]

It seems that with BSLightningShader alpha gradients does not work. With this material type you can only set a uniform alpha value (in the material file) for the whole texture. If you want an alpha gradient, you need to use BSEffectShader, but since BSEffectShader was not really indented for "normal" stuff like armors it may look strange.

[mazakala]

It seems that with BSLightningShader alpha gradients does not work. With this material type you can only set a uniform alpha value (in the material file) for the whole texture. If you want an alpha gradient, you need to use BSEffectShader, but since BSEffectShader was not really indented for "normal" stuff like armors it may look strange.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that. This is not for an armor anyway, so it might work just fine.