hide triangle of animated mesh

Ive been racking my brain for weeks on this one. I tried splitting my model into different parts but no matter what I do, it looks like a horror film puppet. All I need to do is to be able to hide certain triangles on the model at certain times.

Ive tried using alpha commands, but once I enable alpha on my model, the whole model becomes somewhat see through no matter what I do. Ive rebuilt the mesh triangle by triangle to enable vertex colors (Why? I dont know), but it loses any animation doing this.

Anyone got any ideas on this?

Only way I can think of, would be to have a few transparent pixels in your texture (texture would need to be loaded with the alpha flag), and set the UVs of the triangles vertices so that the triangle gets mapped onto the transparent part of the texture.

There's a downside to this, you'd need to make sure the triangles in question have unique vertices, by that I mean the triangles vertices must NOT be shared/used by any other triangles, otherwise the texture mapping on those 'other' triangles will look screwed up.

Which means, you're going to need to edit those triangles in your model/animation app (in my 3D app I'd select the triangles and 'unweld' them), before you export it to B3D format.



Chuckie? :P



It's hacky, but should work.

If all else fails, I may try your recommendation.

Im thinking that If I have the base texture loaded, any tris I need to hide can be hidden by copying the texture with the hidden trianlgles (painted black) onto the base texture and applying this new texture to the model.

So, what I need to do is...
Load the base texture.
Load the mask texture that has the triangles I want to hide painted black.
merge the two textures.
Apply this new texture to the model.

Whattaya think?