Mesh/texturing help/info required

How do I fix this?



The leaf which points to the top has been cut-away by the leaf to it's right.

I assume this is mesh-related and I need to do something to the mesh.

I have seen people make trees before whereby the leaf chunks are just square meshes, yet the end result is a nicely textured tree whereby you would have no idea the leaves where attached to square meshes.

is it possible the alpha mask is misaligned on those leaves

No - the mesh and texture will be fine - I lifted this out of Oblivion.

The effect seen above depends on the angles you view the mesh at. Leaves above other leaves create the same effect.

Is it still there in Blitz? Could just be a rendering problem of the 3d modeller you're using.

Actually, in Blitz it looks totally bent and gay:



How do I fix this cheeky, little, scamp?

Oblivion would have used a Scene Graph to prevent that problem, alpha transparency screws up rendering order, a scene graph orders rendering taking into account the transparent objects and rendering them accordingly.

sniff?

Sureley this is fixable without a 'Scene Graph'?

Sureley this should be simple to fix?

Is the problem with the mesh or the texture?

I was assuming the mesh.

You have to remember, Oblivion is using SpeedTree to place all their foliage. I strongly doubt one of their plants will work in B3D.

Mmm, not sure they are using 'SpeedTree' to place foliage.

With regard to the visual problem, they appear to be using some kind of mask - note the grey edges:




Shame I know nothing about textures and modelling - sniff.

Should be fixable. Not sure why its wrong in that first picture. The problem in the Blitz image is that the leaves aren't being alphad/masked at all. Either because the texture doesn't contain alpha/mask data, or because the flags aren't being turned on correctly for the texture.

Oh, one thing I should mention (in case it is important) - they are using .dds textures. I have converted the textures to .png

Thats a really common problem with blitz thats hard to overcome. Especialy if your trying to sort the alpha of a self intersecting mesh.

You can tweak sort order by seperating the mesh into layers, and moving the local pivot to control the sort order somewhat. But I never found an easy efficient way to do that well in blitz3D.

In SOW that uses Ogre, this is pretty easy to get around using the alpha rejection controls in a material pass. You can also control the depth bias of a pass, the passes of a material in a specific order.

I think we just need a more modern render engine for blitz

Well, interestingly, I have sort of solved it (still testing it) - but have created a NEW PROBLEM.

Previously, I was loading the mesh with the texture alreay mapped to it - so I was just loading a mesh.

I just did a test by loading an untextured mesh and then loading the texture with the 'alpha' flag enabled then applying it to the mesh.

The new result is the leaves are great - but the purple petals have dissapeared.

This new problem at least looks better than the old problem.

This shows the NEW problem:

Where have the purple petals gone?

Peter Piper Picked 'em.

Got a link to the mesh & texture so I/we can take a look?

I doubt Puki could post the content up here. Its violating copyright as it is, but distributing it could get him in trouble.

I fixed it:

looking better and better, Puki.. :)

What was causing the purple petal problem puki?

Not totally sure. However, what I did notice with some of the vedgetation meshes is that they were not double-sided. So, with some of them, when you walked around them they partially disappeared.

With that in mind, I converted the above plant to double-sided and solved the problem.

I have to do each plant individually as some of them appear okay and I only want to double-side the ones that badly need it.

Not sure if there is another option I could have taken - purely as I know nothing about textures and meshes.

You could have just used the EntityFX flag '16' telling Blitz to render backfaces for that entity, would have saved you a few polygons.

I kept copies of the meshes that I converted - I'll take a look at the option "Leiden".

Okay. Was just interested to know how you resolved the problem. Nice screenshots too...

"Leiden", setting EntityFX flag to '16' does not work in this case. So, currently, my only option is the one I took. Which, regrettably, increases the faces - but at least it is only on a few of the plants.

I was referring to how EntityFX would have rendered the non double sided faces on the plants. How come you put my name in ""'s?