New to the forums searching for help

[kiff86]

Ok hi every one. I have searched high and low for an answer to my problem, I am fairly new to modelling / texturing for Wc3 and wasnt sure exactly where this should be posted. But seeing as I'm using 3dsMax and the problem is with the warcraft material I thought i'd try here first.

Ok so my problem involves the model which is a single polymesh, warcraft3 material and the full alpha setting.
I have a TGA with an alpha transparency channel mapped to diffuse and the setting Full alpha turned on.

the result in warcraft3 art tools preview from the side come out like this:


this is pretty much what I wanted to achieve but problems arise when I rotate to behind the handle:


as you can see parts of the model/texture can be seen through others that should be obscuring them. I'm pretty sure this is to do with the way I have modelled and textured the weapon as the problem does not occur when I use the opaque setting, as aposed to full alpha, in the material file.

Any help is apreciated as I can't take this forward unless I know whats wrong. I apologise if this has been posted on but as I say I have searched both this forum and warcraft3campaigns, perhaps I just dont know what I should be searching for.

 

[kiff86]

Ok I worked it out for myself, but I thought I'd just post back to let anyone who has the same problem know how to fix it. Basicly after reading alot of resources I had gotten no-where, so i decided to go back to the start and re-read through the warcraft3 art tool documentation. Low and behold I had neglected to take in one simple piece of informtion:

"Full Alpha – Standard blend mode using an 8-bit alpha channel texture and/or opacity channel. Depth set is turned off. Draw order is in the transparent queue. Overlapping tris can cause errors in sort order. This is the slowest-drawing blend mode."

I then decided that to counter this overlap I would seperate my mesh into two parts. I did this by selecting the set of faces making up the blade portion of my model and selecting detatch, leaving me with 2 polymeshes, the guard and handle being one, the blade being another. I then created 2 warcraft3 materials both identical to each-other apart from their advanced transparency setting, for the guard and handle mesh's texture I selected "opaque", and for the crystal-ish-blade (for which i wanted the transparency) I selected "full alpha". All i did from here is apply the relevant material to the relavent polymesh.

Voila! No more overlapping, what could be simpler? I feel a bit daft for having to post about my problem on your forums, but hey, atleast if someone else comes searching for the same thing then they will find something usefull.