^ oh no!!!

I'm using the nm + spec shader form the Wiki on my tree I just got done with. But for some reason, I'm having this weird problem with my alpha channel on the needles. When I move around, it's "selectively transparent", and seems to make parts transparent at random. Hideous! Lol!

I've used this same shader for other things before, without this problem. Take a look at this leaf sprite I made for dead leaves on the ground, using the same shader in the same manner:



See? Perfect... And I did it exactly the same for both mdls. I even get the same problem if I make an alpha map (bmp) and add it to skin settings. So I'm utterly confused and frustrated. Any ideas?

hmm, well i modified that shader last and I'm not sure what I did with alpha. I know in the past I've taken it and added alpha support but I'm not didn't think i included it in the uploaded version. but then again if you did it with the leaves that means i obviously did.... hmmm I really have no idea why alpha would be working for one and not the other.

After inventing thousands of new curse words, this is what I've got:



Still not quite what I'm looking for, but now it's actually workable.

But it's rather unbelievable what I had to do to get here. I had to load all of the skins in the correct order: diffuse, normal, spec. Then I had to delete the diffuse skins, leaving skins: 2,3,5,6,8, and 9. Then I had to select skin 2, and reload and set up skin 1, so 1 actually came after 2. I had to do the same for all skin sets. Then I applied them, and rendered. And that's what I got. I have NO clue why you have to do this, but it's the only way that worked. It's rather ridiculous, lol.

The picture is too small to do justice to it. The textures are real photos, and it looks really good already. I'm not even close to finished. Still lots of tweaking needed on normal and spec maps.

Ok, here's a close up shot of how the needles look, to give you a better idea.



Does this look good to you guys? Honestly...

In case you're wondering, this is just a level built of primitives to test textures and shaders on. Not anything for a game. So don't make fun of my ghetto castle, lol.

Hmmm... I'm just not convinced this looks good from farther away. The needles kind of look solid, like green triangles until you get closer.



Without the shader, it WOULD look great, except for that weird semi-transparency problem you get with 32bit tga. Why does that happen? Why doesn't the engine just "listen" to what my alpha channel tells it, rather than making the whole thing partially "see-through"? If there was a way around that, I think this tree could look really awesome.

well that blur your getting is because your file contains what are called mipmaps, basically lower resolution versions of your image to render from farther away similarly to the way lod works for models.

Ahh... You're right. Didn't think about that. Would be rather inefficient to be full res further away. Thanks for the reminder.

So, what do you think of it anyway?

looks fine, i'd suggest putting a little more variation of leaf type in there so the focus isnt completly on the pine needs (unrealistic, but it will take the focus off of the fan shaped things a little more at a distance)

The level looks a bit flat, are there any lights in there?

The level isn't meant to be anything special, and isn't even for a game. Just a little testing zone. I'm only concerned with the tree.

Thanks lostclimate, but what other leaf types could I put on a pine tree other than pine needles? It's a southern pine, as found here in the southern US. That's pretty much how they look. I made all the textures from real pics. I built the actual tree based on the hundreds of them I see every day, lol.