Transparent mesh problem

[Werne]

Since I've solved a problem I had before, now a new one appeared :facepalm:. And, since I'm not sure where to put this thread, I'm going to put it here, admins are free to move it if it doesn't belong here.

 

Anyway, I made a transparent mesh (a cocktail glass) by adding a NiAlphaProperty in nifskope and changing the flags untill it became transparent. It (kind of) worked. But when placed in-game it became, well, weird. If looked from a certain angle it looks good, but when I change the angle, the mesh becomes darker in some places while the others are good. Is there a way to fix this? Here are some pics to better explain my problem.

 

In this pic the glass looks ok:

 

But in this one it looks weird:

[LHammonds]

Configuring the model for transparency is only part of the process. You did good in finding the NIF property that enables the transparency but you completely avoided mentioning the 2nd half of the transparency equation. The Textures. You have a diffuse (color) map and a normal map. The amount of transparency and where it is applied is controlled in the alpha channel.

 

Info pages:

 

What are all these texture files?

Exporting Transparent Textures

Multilayered Transparency

[Werne]

I really thought textures had nothing to do with the transparency, but it seems I was wrong. Well, time to read, thanks for the help.

[Ghogiel]

If I had to guess anything about shading errors, it would be either a normals issue, ie they are flipped, or a normal map issue.

[Werne]

I used a flat normal map on that model and it doesn't matter how I flip the normals, it always looks like that. I'm still experimenting with the textures, I managed to reduce the problem, now I need to figure out what I've done to reduce it so I can fix it completely.

[Werne]

OK, I figured out what I messed up, it's the faces, they're facing in different directions. I am an idiot :wallbash:. Darn it, now I need to find how to know which side of the face is which in blender :facepalm:.

[LHammonds]

When in EDIT mode, there is a "Mesh Tools More" tab, click the "Draw Normals" button to enable the light-blue fuzz which lets you know which way the normals are pointed. Control how long the fuzz is by adjusting the NSize value (default = 0.1)

 

http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/Conan_Lon/Blender/DrawNormalsFindProblems.jpg

[Ghogiel]

the fuzz

:thumbsup: that made me giggle.

[Werne]

@LHammonds Yeah, I figured that out while playing around in blender.

 

It seems I'm doing something wrong, I can't get the mesh to be transparent without the color deformation, tried reversing the faces, making textures for a millionth time, even tried making a new mesh and trying again from scratch, nothing helped, I'm still stuck on color changing transparent mesh, it's driving me insane :wallbash:.

 

I also opened a vanilla shot glass to see how bethesda did it and I found something interesting. The shot glass isn't transparent in NifSkope untill I extract it's textures an place them in the Data folder, but my glass is. Once the textures appear on the mesh it becomes transparent. I'll try playing arond with my textures again.

 

On the bright side, I finally learned how to use blender to make my models and now I'm quitting Sketchup for good :dance:.

Edited November 25, 2011 by Werne