EDIT: sorry, the planes are actually white. I don’t know why I said black in the title.
EDIT2: Ehh, I guess the planes are white in the 3D view, but when I render, the planes are black. I guess that is where the title came from.
This is a very strange problem going on with me. So first of all, here is the picture. Please look at it and I will describe the problem: http://i.imgur.com/1cimmM4.png
So, as you can see, I have a character rig, and the whole thing is UV mapped. The thing on the right side is the skin of the character. I have properly arranged the UV layout to match the skin.
The clothing and the skin part of the character work fine, the only part that doesn’t work is the hat part. On the character, you can see a white box. That is supposed to be 6 transparent planes arranged into a box shape, and I have given them a separate material than the actual body part. The hat texture and the body texture have their face textures enabled, and the hat has the face texture alpha enabled.
So if the face texture alpha is enabled on the hat, and you can see that the image on the right side, where the front of the hat’s UV is selected is transparent except for the front of the glasses, why is there a white box? The glasses do appear, but the white box is the problem.
I won’t have internet for the weekend unfortunately since it went down, so I have to submit this thread from another place and won’t be able to respond back until a few days, but here is the blender file with the textures packed into it: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/23933
If someone could please help me, that would be great.
Since that hat or glasses are the same mesh and it’s painted on the same image you do not need two materials actually. If you want them, fine, just make sure material UNDER the hat mesh can haz transparent shadows. Material should have Alpha set to 0 and texture needs to influence Alpha.
There are double vertices somewhere; increase Merge Distance a bit on T-panel.
Hope that helps. http://www.pasteall.org/blend/23939
Alright, wow. You just made the rig like 10000x better. But I need to ask you how haha.
First of all, why was it necessary to use the image texture when it was already UV mapped? What purpose does that serve? Also, your character did not have the “hat borders” http://imgur.com/zrJH3dy How did you get rid of them?
Also, how did you get the character’s “hat” to be transparent in the 3-d view? Mine looks like this when I copied all of your settings: http://imgur.com/VBIaygc
Another thing, when I go into edit mode with your rig, it had all those strange blue markings: http://imgur.com/1woCiju What are those :o?
Aaaand one last thing, you said to increase merge distance a bit on the t-panel? What does that even mean haha?
I’m sorry about all of those questions. But you seem like a very knowledgeable Blender user, and I could learn a lot from your from the questions I just asked. Thanks again haha. You’ve helped me quite a bit already!
;). 10 k times - that’s a true lies. It’s the same as it was, just works.
Mapping some image to UV coordinates is not the same as using material for object where this texture is overlaid using created UV map.
Mapping correctly - one.
Add material including one or several correctly UV mapped textures - two.
Afaik i just deleted most of the “hat” mesh leaving just glasses :evilgrin:. But Transparent Shadow thing is still important if you’d like to paint something more, hair, hat or whatnot. Remember - that other Material - under.
Strange markings are representing what side mesh faces are facing - face normals is the term. If you had some pointing inside, you’d have had strange things going on in render. Worth checking them. Can be switched on/off on N-panel (one which appears if you hit N while mouse is in window; same goes for T-panel i mentioned earlier.) Mesh Display - Normals, cube icon. Another is Vertex normals, not so much of a use for them.
While modelling occasionally one vertex is sitting right on the other. By just looking on the screen it looks ok but some operations miserably fail. All because of Doubles. They need to be cleaned up - w key, Remove Doubles or T-panel button.
When you Remove Doubles (i’d recommend doing Remove Doubles, Recalculate Normals and Apply Rotation/Scale as often as possible ;)), usually default distance which blender considers to find doubles is set to tiniest possible value in universe; as a result if you had them little bit more apart they are not considered doubles by software. This threshold value can be adjusted on T-panel right after you do Remove Doubles command. Make sure you can see lower part of T-panel and increase value. Do not overdo - can lead to unexpected distortions of the mesh. If that happens, lower value and it’ll come back.
From what you said about the UV mapping and texturing not being the same thing, why does it matter if you do both of them though. Why is just UV mapping not enough. I was thinking that since I only had 1 material, and it’s transparency alpha was set to 0, the texture was needed to influence it or something, and that is the reason. Am I correct in assuming that?
Also, I scaled all of the UV maps to .95 and so the boarders of the hat, or any other are not there, and there are no strange white lines on the mesh. I guess that is a good thing.
Here is the latest one if you want to take a look: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/24035
So, again, thanks. I’ve learned a lot from your comments. It’s definitely going to help me in modeling:D:D
You should do both of course if you want correct end result - do UV unwrap, have new image, paint it according to newly created map (or move map parts to get them on some already painted image) and then use map and texture image to create some material. However mapping and material creation are somehow different actions and last part is often left out. Never mind tho; you had material and texture was there. You’re correct that if material’s alpha is set to 0, texture takes over revealing needed parts.
Man, that hat thing made of several not connected, not aligned planes causes goose skin :D. If that was made out of one cube it would have looked much better. I believe you used Smart unwrap; while it is smart move to use it on bent surfaces, cubes don’t need that - put some seams and they unwrap fine. Scaling is fine there; usually you paint texture with overlap of some 8 to 12 pixels to be sure there are no gaps on model.
Here’s how to get transparency show up in 3d view:
Well, gl and happy blending, move on to some rounded shapes!
