Question to Chosen Few; Alpha sorting bug

Anyone else can answer if they know, but Chosen seems to always have good answers

I have a certain flat prim that I made curvy using the transparent texture trick. I want to do this on both sizes so the curve is even but the alpha sorting bug causes problems if I put the texture on both sides. I can't make this shape with prims, so it has to be done with textures. Know of any ways to get around this, or am I just out of luck?

A texture on the far side of a prim is not visible, nor is it subject to alpha sort bugs. The texture you place on one side of a prim has no effect on the texture that you place on the other side.

For example, I have a pair of simple wings. Each wing has a 100% alpha texture on the thin edges, and has a flipped version of the wing texture on the two flat sides. From the front, I see only the front texture. From edge on, I see nothing. Moving to behind the wing, I see only the back texture. Even if I made the wing a foot thick, looking through the transparent area on one side will show nothing at all on the far side of that prim.

If you're hoping to somehow make the edge of the prim appear to follow the alpha-mapped edge of the texture on one or both surfaces, so it looks at the edge like the prim has real thickness, it can't be done. At least not with a single prim. In the wing example above, they will always appear to be paper thin, and the position of the wing will jump just slightly as you go over the edge, since the prim has a certain minimum thickness.

You might possibly fake making the far side visible by using more than one prim, and by texturing the sides facing the front on both of them. But that would indeed suffer from the alpha-sorting bug, as there is no way to control which of the two alpha-mapped textures facing you are shown as 'in front' of the other.

My problem isn't with the edge in between the sides, I already tried and realized that it's impossible as you said The problem is that at certain angles the entire "front" or "back" texture shows as transparent even though it's not supposed to be. If I make either side a 24-bit non-transparent texture then this doesn't happen. I know that I can't truly fix this, but I'm wondering if there are ways to lessen or hide the problem while keeping both textures.

Nevermind I figured out a way to fix it! Thanks for your response though Ceera


Edit: The problem seems to be that if I have a prim with transparent parts on both sides and they fold up on each other (think of a U shape), then at viewing angles where your line of sight would go through the prim twice (one at each side of the U) the front side gets semi-transparent. If I separate the shape into two prims so that your line of sight never goes through the prim twice then it doesn't happen. I'm really a noob at textures and graphics stuff so I dunno if you guys already know this

Sorry I didn't see your post sooner, Apollo. Been really busy today.

I'm glad you worked out your problem. Your solution sounds like exactly what I would have suggested. Another way to do it would be to place an opaque prim between two transparent surfaces to act as kind of shield, masking the parts you don't actually need to see through, preventing them interfering with each other.