Oh, I didn't mean to imply you were working for ZBrush. I just thought I saw posts from you along with all the other people waiting for the ZBrush release. I'm really sorry to hear about the pressing work-load. ;) What do you translate? Is it rewarding work? Actually, wouldn't like to get this off-topic, but I'd be interested to hear about it, perhaps. Then again, I'm a software developer and by the end of the day I don't care to talk about work at all. Sometimes I don't even want to look at a monitor...

Yeah, that ZBrush release was a doozy. Were you following that all night? I myself was up until around 1:45 PST, but I'd only bought ZBrush the day before so it wasn't so critical for me. Anyway, about this transparency problem. I really do appriciate your attention to this, and I did try loading your scene and rendering. However, I also got the same results with your scene as with my scene. Are you sure you didn't have antialiasing turned on when you rendered it without the artifacts? In this simple scene the problem is displayed so minutely that the AA entirely removes visibilty to it... I'm still hoping for a resolution to this, but it is starting to look less hopefully. The e-on tech support said to just turn on AA to blend away the artifacts, but while that removes visibilty of them in this sample scene it is not enough for the complex scene I first noticed the problem with. In that scene, as shown in the picture I posted earlier, the artifacts are so large that they discolor the area even with AA. Of course I could clean up in post, but that's not really the point. It looks like a straight-up rendering defect to me, applying transparency to non-transparent objects where they intersect transparent ones... What do you guys make of it?
Thanks again,
Matthew

I'v just tried these changes to the transparent objects' settings. Unfortunately I am still seeing the same results. Were you able to reproduce the glitch? This is actually a show-stopper in the degree it is occurring in my project. Please let me know if anyone has any suggestions or ideas. Thanks all, Matthew

Oh, here's a close-up of the viewprob test scene render, showing some of the offending dots..

Thank you for the response. I have re-checked the materials of the problem items and verified they are correct. Here is an ugly close-up showing the problem, I've circled it in blue. Also, I've got a vue scene that reproduces the problem to a smaller degree using non-copywriten objects. Rendered without antialias, I consistently see small dots on the stairs where they intersect with the spheres and become transparent, showing the red plane below or the shaded backside of the stairs. Obviously a few pixels incorrectly rendered are not the end of the world...But the problem seems to get more severe the more complex the intersecting objects are. What results do you get? Thanks again, Matthew vue scene url: http://www.astolat.com/mad_jack/vueprob.zip

Oh, I really wouldn't know what dll it is. I could go through the install.log for the demo and do a test. Maybe I will sometime this week if I find the time. The only reason I'm regretting installing the demo is that now I'm trying to figure out how to afford the full Deep Paint 3D. Cuz I rather dig the app. Matthew

Dave, I look forward to seeing whatever you can find. Thank you for the trouble. Matthew

Well, now that you have my attention, what more can you tell me? Thanks in advance, if this pans out by the way. Matthew

Hey mjustmike. No, not trying to fake a mesh. The example I used was just to illustrate what kind of thing I'm trying to accomplish, and the grid does a good job of demonstrating that.

Hmm. Thanks for your reply, bloodsong. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to that. I had hoped I wouldn't, though.

Picture (3), variable scale bump...

Picture (2), the gradient

Right. Well, since I can't do what I want in Vue, I'll try to dummy it up in PS. So, I have a plane with a procedural bump material as shown in (1). I have a gradient map(2) that I want to use to control the scale of the bump material, such that the scale will be variable across the object as shown in (3). Does that make sense? Pictures (2) and (3) follow...