weird texture behaviour

I've been using some hi-res photo's as textures lately, think of nature scenes and pictures of wood grain.
When using these as textures they are transparent from some angles/distances. Also with the nature screens objects behind it shine through.
I tried to reduce the resolution before pasting them in a PS 512 x512 px document, but that does not seem to help.
Does anyone know how to fix this ?


Thanx

If both your textures require transparency then there is no fix unfortunately and its something many of us either avoid or use various workarounds.

The problem is called 'The Alpha Sorting Glitch' discussed here in the texture forums approx once every 2 weeks.

Try searching 'Alpha Sorting glitch' for other threads and read the 2 stickies at the top of this forum highlighted in Bold Orange Writing. One is Transparency and Alpha Channels and Texture size pixel count which may also be of some use.

The long and short of the "problem" is if your texture requires any transparency at all it must be saved as a 32 bit texture. 32 bit textures contain the alpha channel and when any two (or more) textures containing alpha are placed in such a way that the textures line up to your viewer front to back you will see the sorting problem.......where the two (or more) textures appear to swap back and forth. The OpenGL rendering engine gets confused on which texture is in front and which is in back so it switches from one to the other according to the angle you view it from. As I've heard DirectX also has this problem.......but I can't swear to that.

The solution is to not place 32 bit textures in a way that they can be viewed inline with each other. AND not to save textures as 32 bit when they contain no transparency.......save as 24 bit instead.