transparent texture bleed

Does anyone know of a way to combat the problem of textures with transparencies bleeding into other textures/flickering when two prims are somewhat close together?

No. I ahve tried several things and nothig seems to work for me. Hopefully someone might have a solution and post here.

Hi!

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to what you see when SL renders two prims with transparency out of order. (The one in back appears to be in front, and vice versa.)

They don't have to be anywhere near each other to do this, by the way; just in the same line of view. And they don't actually have to be transparent, just have an Alpha Map, even if it's solid white. (Which is the biggest reason why you should use 24 bit .tga if you don't need transparency.)

That's the infamous Alpha Sorting Bug, and I'm afraid that there's no reliable fix.

I've been trying to solve that one for a couple of years now.

It seems that, in many cases, if the camera angle puts the Base Point of the front prim higher on the screen than the Base Point of the back prim, it will render correctly. But it's not always that way. And of course, even when it is working viewing that set of prims from the back, (or any other angle where the base points change relative heights,) shows the bug again.

But that does work (most of the time) for things like screens in front of fireplaces, which won't be seen from the back unless someone cameras into the fire, in which case they deserve what they see.

Like much of the rest of SL, this is just something that we've all had to learn to live with. And some people, like the ones who make 3 prim flowers, trees, fire, etc. have learned to benefit from it.

(By the way, MadamG, I love your modeling studio!)

Well, while the bug sucks, I appreciate all the info, Robin! I suppose it's pointless to bug report it or propose a vote. lol

As I understand it (I'm not an expert in this field) it's not an LL/SL specific bug, it's somewhere fundamental in the way that alpha channels get rendered in just about every system that uses them.

In games such as WoW they have (largely) fixed content so the designers spend ages making sure alpha-sorting doesn't impact their world. Their avies presumably get rendered without alpha channels, so that's the moving bits OK too.

In SL that's just not possible, because of coure we all make our own content.

Yes, someone has cleared this up already. Alpha sorting is not a unique problem to SL. It's a problem in all polygon-based rendering engines.

The only reason we don't see this problem elsewhere is that game content designers have ultimate control over what in the environment has alpha channels. It's a simple matter for them to avoid the problem because they know it exists.

LL, however, has no control over this. WE are the ones who create the alpha channel textures and they won't tell us how we shouldn't be using those textures.

It's up to us to avoid those situations because we are the content designers.