[--Steve-O--]

i'm in the process of upgrading all my stuff to work with the 3.6.10 built i finally installed and ran into this issue, on most of my fighters the texture around the canopy is completly opaque, like its been rendered ingame with textures on both the front and back faces of the hull/canopy. i had no issue with this in 3.6.9. so what causes this? wrong DXT compression would be my first guess, except that one fighter the lancer which is built and textured with the same methods and DXT format as everything else, works fine. is there a quick fix for this? eventually i'm going to rework all of those fighters to use transparent canopies but until then i want to know what went wrong.

[Vasudan Admiral]

What process did you use for setting up the cockpit glass?

The typical and safest approach is to attach the cockpit glass polys to the main hull as the last thing thing before conversion - so they're a part of the main hull object but will appear last in the list of the hulls polys. Only in this case is transparency rendered completely accurately. Other methods will work some or most of the time (glass on the main hull texture, glass as separate subobject, cockpit interior as a separate subobject etc), but from certain angles you'll usually be able to find a problem somewhere.

[blowfish]

Err ... I think he was talking about the opacity of texture itself.  The most common approach to this is to actually separate the polygons that will be used for the canopy, and apply the texture "glass to them (in the mediavps).  Makes for cleaner edges anyway.  If you decide to do this, refer to VA's post on where to put the glass in terms of hierarchy.

If you'd prefer to keep everything set up the way it is, first just try 32 bit TGAs.  See if they work.  Go back and make sure the transparency actually exists in PS or whatever you use.  If you can't find the problem, just try resaving the files (make sure it is DXT3 or DXT5).

Also, IIRC the lancer cockpit is opaque too.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Oh right - I mainly took in the 'canopy' and 'rendering errors' bits and jump-assumed the rest. My bad.

[--Steve-O--]

thanks for the replies, i decided to go ahead and revise the models themselves to adopt the transparent canopy glass. so far the wraith and thor are done. this transparency stuff isn't as hard as it seemed. the only B-t-h is modifying my old solid hulls for this. my new fighters i think im going to just cut the tub straight into the hull from now on then add all the detail junk as the cockpit model... try to avoid boolean unions as much as possible. they are not worth the trouble anymore, yup bad modeling habit right there.