Odd transparency effect with sculpties ...

I've been playing around building my first few sculpties and have noticed a rather odd transparency effect. If I look at the sculptie from the side (90 degrees to the object's z-axis) then the surface of the sculptie looks fine (apart form the usual bumpiness). However, if I look directly along the z-axis of the sculptie, then I appear to be able to see inside it. This becomes more noticable when adding varying textures to the surface - from the top I can see the texture on the bottom. I'm not zooming in too close either.

I've never noticed this effect before with normal prims - and I'm not making the texture transparent at all (the effect is noticable even with the default wooden texture).

I was wondering if anyone else had seen this effect?

Fred

I see the same thing, was wondering what I do wrong...
I do not make my own textures, was just playing with the ones in the library

That's odd. It sounds like the "inside out" effect where you are actually looking at the back of the other side. The solution to that is to flip the texture horizontally.

But the fact that you see it with the textures in the library, means that it is something else. I just applied some of the textures in the library and they look fine to me.

Adding a texture with transparency does this. If a face at the other side can be seen if the near side was totally transparent, then it shows through even if the texture is opaque at that point. I believe it's a problem with Z draw order and the same effect (at least last time I checked pre 1.16) can be seen on normal prims that are hollow. Alpha draw in general is one of the known problems with SLs rendering as far as I know. I assumed it was the same bug, so didn't report.. Maybe we should..

I have seen this with an "inverted" sculptie map, try flipping the sculptie image before uploading it in order to turn it inside out.

Sorry dont have any images of it but think I saw it being discussed somwhere on the forums too. I'de search for the link but heading out for some RL stuff right now.

-Phid


P.S. Im still fine tuning my sculptie creation process too and will post somthing once I have finished pulling the rest of my hair out on texturing the sculptie

Many thanks everyone !

Yes, I had the sculptie texture inside out (the z-axis was upside down). That explains why the sculptie had an weird appearence as I moved it, as I was looking at the inside surface.

I've flipped it left to right and its completely solid now.

The only problem now is the compression making it lumpy ...

Fred

Get rid of the goofy compression issue by "resizing" the sculptie BMP up to 256x256 or 512x512.

-Phid


** Edit **
Unless its the exportation thing your talking about, I get that too. You can see the effects of this if you export a SL sculpt map from Wings then import it back into wings from that same sculpt map you just exported... Surface gets all irregular.

I dont know if thats an issue with the "resolution" of the BMP pixel value or a rounding issue with the exporter. I'm hoping to try a different exporter soon to see the difference.

I added examples of this for 64x63 and 32x31 spheres.

-Phid