I was reading a New World Notes article that mentions a JuicyBomb article about a viewer named AYAstorm. Wow. Never heard of it. I read Juicy’s AYAstorm article. Interesting.
OH WOW!
I find this viewer fixes the alpha glitch I have been working around for a couple of DECADES. OMG!
What is the ‘alpha glitch’?
You can see the glitch in the images at C & D.
The top two images were captured using AYAstorm. The bottom two using Firestorm 7.2.4 (beta/preview).
Notice how the hair renders at A & B and compare to C & D. If you look at D you’ll see the hair transparency is causing the wall to render on top of the painting. Not as clearly but the same at C.
At A it is transparency on top of transparency. Both A & B render the hair and transparencies correctly.
In like 20 years no one fixed this problem. Yay! We now have a fix!
Technically, this is an alpha rendering depth problem. The software messes up figuring out what is in front of which. We have been working around the problem by manually attaching things to control where they are in the avatar attachment render cue. When you use Attach you get a list of the avatar’s attachment points. After each point’s name is a number. The number tells where the point is in the render cue. For clothes and hair, you want the hair to render AFTER the clothes. This works.
But that leaves the problem of the hair, painting, and the wall. We have little control over how the painting and wall render when transparent stuff is in front. The problem is worse in places like a forest where there lots of textures with transparency.
There is more… page links below.