.paa Transparency Trouble

[Sanctuary]

Have you tested that soldier with a .pac texture, did he show then? I think its the model somehow I just tested my Black ops and they show through the windows and they are clad in .paa textures where as some of your ww4 men clad in .pac dose not show. also the gun when held by some of your men does not show but if they drop it I can see it lying on the ground also the face is missing and thats a .pac if I remember. I also tested the muzzle flash and it penetrates some of you men but it does not penetrate my BO's with the exception of the soldier firing it. I could see your east guerrilla fine but the replacement Russians did not show.

Yes, when i tested that soldier with a PAC it showed.
I tested the soviet replacement soldier and indeed i just noticed that as you say he does not show through a PAA window despite using a PAC texture, while the the soviet officer replacement that use exactly the same texture shows perfectly in the window.

That's really strange, because i can't see what i have done differently for both soldiers.
When i built them, it was a same model with a naked head, i merged it with a helmet model (and every of its already prepared lods) that was already prepared (that was using the same texture as the base model) on one and saved it after making sure selections were correct.
Then i took the model with the naked head and merged it with the already prepared beret model (that was using the same texture as the base model), and saved it.

Then binarized the both of them.
So in this process i did absolutely no extra step for any of them, so there is no reason the faces would have all gone in bottom (and when i tried to "face on top" another model that was going to the same window bug, it did not solved it anyways) for one model and not for the other.
Why the building window PAA transparency works for one, and does not work for the other is beyond me.

In the side the BIS small fence that can be seen around one of the house does not appear either if you look at that building from the window.


So is it really a problem on the models(fences, soldiers, vehicles), or on the building and window one ?

[vektorboson]

So is it really a problem on the models(fences, soldiers, vehicles), or on the building and window one ?

First, thanks for the link you provided. As Suma stated in the post, if the average alpha value (weighted by face size) is below a threshold, then the object is considered to be 'transparent'. Now in the case of the building: The building has so many non-transparent parts that maybe the engine considers the building to be 'opaque'.
Now for your soldiers: They all have spectacles, which uses a transparent texture, perhaps, by sheer chance, those spectacles bring the average alpha value right under the threshold, and thus those soldiers are always drawn after the building.

Funny thing is: In my unfinished objects pack I released a bus station with glass, and I always wondered why the transparency on that station worked, but not a train depot building I've been working on...

[-Martin-]

select all faces using the window texture in O2. Faces>Move top

Thanks’ that worked, now the floor of the building is visible.

But some buildings I made can be seen through the window except one that has about 8000 points; I think there might be something with the properties as STGN said. But I found a good solution to my problem, I hid the background of the windows with shelves, but I hope that I will find some kind of solution to this problem, it’s very annoying



Thanks for the help guys, if yo got any more ideas please post them

[STGN]

Well if the soldier showed with the .pac it might be a problem associated with both texture and model. I get the crazy idea that it might be a problem with o2 because I notice very different file sizes on 2 guns that are similar in poly size and texture amount my iron sight M4 is 1.9mb where as my M4 with reflex and SD is 0.86mb, should be the other way around by my logic, although they both show through the window. If its a O2 problem which would explain why the soldier might show one time with one texture and the next time with another it would not. Maybe copy pasting the model from old .p3d to a new one could result in a usable model or maybe its just shear random chance which works and which does not.
STGN

[Sanctuary]

That's very strange indeed.
Reminds me of the pain i had to get the PAA window seeing through the PAA turret in the gunner view of my released beta of the WW4 vehicles.
move TOP, move BOTTOM, nothing worked at all, the PAA gunner window was just not seeing through the PAA model that was behind it.

Then out of solutions, i went back to some old archived version of the vehicle, took the PAA textured gunner sight from there and pasted it in the place of the current one ... and it worked.
If only there was any kind of logic behind this things would be so much easier.

I will remove windows from all the BIS stock buildings and release the modified islands into the next WW4 upgrade, so at least PAA and PAC units/vehicles used with them in my mod will not be affected anymore.

[-Martin-]

I opened the model in the Oxygen for OFP, because I use ArmA Oxygen with export old .p3d function (I can’t get textures to show up in the old oxygen) and I re did all the names properties and optimised the model and now all the buildings show except for the one with 8000 points.

I'm going to remove some points from the building and test it, then post my results here. There must be some kind of logic to this.

Don't you guys just love BIS games haha

[STGN]

One reason I can think of for the different file size is that I have one model which is base and I make all the changes to it and then copy paste new parts to the models used in the folder. Perhaps O2 somehow stores some old information in the p3d which makes ingame engine calculate wrong?
One thing I would like to know is if its possible to have the NVG green rendering in front of iron sights on rifles its posible on tanks but somehow not on guns, I hate having a red, red dot when wearing NVGs.
STGN

[Sanctuary]

I think it is possible that some informations from previous modification are accidentally saved or O2/binarize does not interpret them like it should, may explain why sometime the faces move top/move bottom do not do what it is supposed to do regarding their correct ordering after you save a modified model and binarize it.

Too bad in my test i could not find a pattern on how exactly this is happening, makes things a real pain.

I don't think there is much to do regarding the NVG, as it may be some kind of engine hardcoding going on there.

[vektorboson]

One reason I can think of for the different file size is that I have one model which is base and I make all the changes to it and then copy paste new parts to the models used in the folder. Perhaps O2 somehow stores some old information in the pbo which makes ingame engine calculate wrong?

Do you use many named selections? Those take really lots of space; if you want to have slim P3Ds then delete all unnecessary named selections, which are basically all except 'zasleh' (if there is a muzzle flash) and the animated one (can't remember the name)

[-Martin-]

I think this is going to be a surprise to everyone,

As I said I removed about 4000 points from the model making it 3149 points instead of 8000 points and also all the LOD's exept for the first one, and what do you know, the building shows up behind the window. I guess there is some kind of limitation on the polygon count in the model or the .p3d size or something was wrong with the other LOD's...



Looks like I will have to split the building up in to a few parts or something. Ahhhh complications complications keep slowing the project down

But at least we know the cause now.

Here are a few pictures to prove it:

Before:



After: