Problem Unintended semi-transparent mesh

[Arthur Dent]

Fellow Orbinauts,

I'm going to create my own base with custom building meshes. I use Anim8or to create meshes, but I am going to switch to AC3D (I read some good comments in the Orbiter forum and the trial version is just amazing!).

However all my meshes appear very strange in Orbiter:

As you can see, the building is somewhat transparent. The DG, surface and the cloudes shine through. However the other custom building doesn't shine though. Neither does the LPAD.

The same problem occours in every building I create with either anim8or or AC3D.

The material is not set to be transparent and I created the dds texture with the dds plugin for paint.net using the DXT1 format.

I've checked the normals but they seem to be okay (flipping the normals made it worse).

The .msh looks like this for materials and texture:
MATERIALS 1
ac3dmat1
MATERIAL ac3dmat1
0.200 0.200 0.200 1
1.000 1.000 1.000 1
0.200 0.200 0.200 1
0 0 0 1
TEXTURES 1
WASA\RAB1024.dds


I'm using the Surface Base Wizzard to place the meshes.

I hope someone can help me with this rather anoying problem.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Hielor]

Fellow Orbinauts,

I'm going to create my own base with custom building meshes. I use Anim8or to create meshes, but I am going to switch to AC3D (I read some good comments in the Orbiter forum and the trial version is just amazing!).

However all my meshes appear very strange in Orbiter:
{image removed}

As you can see, the building is somewhat transparent. The DG, surface and the cloudes shine through. However the other cusom building doesn't shine though.

The same problem occours in every building I create with either anim8or or AC3D.

The material is not set to be transparent and I created the dds texture with the dds plugin for paint.net using the DXT1 format.

I've checked the normals but they seem to be okay (flipping the normals made it worse).

The .msh looks like this for materials and texture:
MATERIALS 1
ac3dmat1
MATERIAL ac3dmat1
0.200 0.200 0.200 1
1.000 1.000 1.000 1
0.200 0.200 0.200 1
0 0 0 1
TEXTURES 1
WASA\RAB1024.dds


I'm using the Surface Base Wizzard to place the meshes.

I hope someone can help me with this rather anoying problem.

Thanks in advance!

It looks like a z-buffer issue--that is, it looks like it's drawing your building first, and then not updating the z-buffer, so that when the ground behind (and the DG) are drawn they are drawn showing through the building.

What's the size of the base listed as in the config file? Try increasing it. I really don't know how to fix it for sure, though.

 

[Arthur Dent]

Thanks for your quick reply, Hielor!

It wasn't the base size (it was 1000 and I increased to 10000)

but your Idea with the z-buffer and the config file helped me solving the problem:

In my my_custom_base.cfg the MESH section looked like this:

MESH
FILE CUSTOM_FOLDER\custombuilding
POS 500 0 3000
SCALE 1 1 1
UNDERSHADOWS
OWNMATERIAL

I deleted the UNDERSHADOWS and it works now with all my meshes!

Thanks for your help anyway!

 

[Donamy]

I use AC3D religiously, If you need help, just ask.

 

[Hielor]

Thanks for your quick reply, Hielor!

It wasn't the base size (it was 1000 and I increased to 10000)

but your Idea with the z-buffer and the config file helped me solving the problem:

In my my_custom_base.cfg the MESH section looked like this:

MESH
FILE CUSTOM_FOLDER\custombuilding
POS 500 0 3000
SCALE 1 1 1
UNDERSHADOWS
OWNMATERIAL

I deleted the UNDERSHADOWS and it works now with all my meshes!

Thanks for your help anyway!

Ah, yup. UNDERSHADOWS causes that mesh to be drawn first, so that everything else (specifically, shadows) will be drawn on top of it.

Good find, and glad I could help.

Also, to the forum!