Alpha channel generates strange results. I wanted to make a perphorated microphone/loudspeaker cover (with rows of small round holes, like in portable radios;). Thus, the gray face surface should be visible through it. However, Blender Internal fills the holes with... sky! As if the whole head would be invisible behind the mic cover. Is it some strange default setting, or another nasty bug? How to overcome it?

did you put on unified render option? F10 then the most right bottom button? and you know faces only have one visible side so if you want too show both sides make them double sided. what other nasty bug are you refering too? plz report it too the bugtrackers list so it can be solved. great render appart from the holes.

... how about just round black spots? Lou.

Yes, great render and modelling :) Will it be moving some day? Perhaps you are using UV texturing, in that case the surface is only one face rendered. so you must creating aditional geometry backwards holes.

I don't know the answer to your question (and I don't have blender on this computer to try to figure it out since I'm visiting my parents), but you've got some awesome metal textures there!

Great thanks for encouraging remarks about the materials. I (and other people here;) struggled with them for a long while so Im happy the result satisfies you. I hope I would manage to animate Urchin. In fact, this and other, not yet started projects are designed to deliver the stuff needed for a film. Regarding the problem itself: archdruid: Unfortunately, this head will be very close to the camera. ysvry: I tried unified Renderer but it did not help. The microphone looks exactly as it did before. ysvry and vespertilum: The mic mesh IS double sided (Editing>Mesh>DoubleSided). Anyway, please note the interior of the head is visible and thus should be seen through the holes if not the interior of the mic cube itself. Both textures are Orco mapped in cubic manner (btw, how to make them cover all the walls of the microphone?;P). Also I noted that the cube has some shading on its edges. Not only the renderer does not understand its alpha channel but also it puts some blue material under my one and even makes some specular highlights in places where there should be no material at all! I checked on the Editing panel (F9) that the microphone cube has only one material and that it contains only the alpha texture and the color/normal/specular one. When I switched teh Backbuf option off (Scene panel>Output), the "holes" were black although the silvery inner head surface was still visible and should be visible through them, so its really the sky. I have totally no idea what to do now. I tried with inverted texture order and looked in rendering options if there is some setting limiting the number of "looks-through" the alpha channel holes analogous to the parameter in Transparency (rather trial-and-error way). In C4D, I just put the tex and everything worked. I will link the *.blend in a moment, please play with it if you want. If you solve the problem, Id be happy to receive some desc what did you change: Im not yet an experienced Blender user (all these men in the kitchen!;) and I don`t always know where to look in the dungeons of its interface. :P Happy New Year. Ufff...

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/silgrin4d/Gallery_wip/AlphaProblem.zip

OK, here`s the file. Looking fwd your reples. Have a nice day.

Sorry Silgrin, I was not clear. I have just seen your file, and the problem is that there is an UV layout, so the object is rendered at one face. Just switch Viewport Shading to Textured to see it.

Note:
So texture is assingned to every face, and no matter if there is a texture mapped to UV. I have found with two textures assigned to UV only one of them is used, so I prefer don't mapping when I use UV.
End note.

Since you use UV layout pick on TexFace in Materials.

So the thing I'd do is closing the mesh, not with a planar surface, of course :p

And I like the curves of that head, really nice!!!

I check out your file.. maybe it's me.. but the textures weren't with it? So I couldn't help ya. I had a similar problem before with a game I was making. I madel a simple tree model with the a flat texture map for the tree top.. I duplicated it and rotated around about 3 times.. For some reason, I could only see through the leaves from one position.. the other views filled the back ground with sky, same problem you're having.

Oops... I will add the tex tomorrow. I thought I packed the data.

Message edited on: 12/29/2005 02:58

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/silgrin4d/Gallery_wip/AlphaProblem.zip

OK, here`s the packed *.blend. Seems I was well made the previous time, when I tried packing textures it required some 2 or 3 trials before it did. Strange thing... Now I checked rendering it before zipping, should work well. Thanks for replies...

...And the render directly from the linked file. The inner surface of the head is visible and should render behind the mic holes... but it doesn`t:P

It must be a simple problem at last :p Go to Mirror Transp and pick on ZTransp or RayTransp. The sky effect must be beacouse of Subtract option.