Alpha Textures Not Working in Vision 2021

[Jesse Cogswell]

Good morning, it's me again.  I've just noticed that my alpha textures are no longer working in SP3.1.  I don't know exactly when they stopped.  I opened up the Vision 2021 Demo file to make sure that something wasn't wrong on my end, and sure enough, the alpha textures didn't work there either.

 

Screenshot below.  Is this something wrong with my machine?  If this appears to be working on your end, I'll try repairing/reinstalling Vision 2021 and see if that fixes it.

 

[Mark Eli]

Hey Jesse,

In the properties window, uncheck the "Use Alpha Channel" box. I'm not sure if it's intended to be that way or not. Either way, setting use alpha to false makes it look correct for me.

Let me know how things work out for you.

 

[Jesse Cogswell]

Hmmm, unchecking that box makes no appreciable difference for me.  I did try it in Vision 2020 and 2019, and interestingly, alpha textures only seemed to work in 2019.

 

Vision 2021 Screen Capture

 

Vision 2019 Screen Capture

[Mark Eli]

In Edit>Vision Preferences, make sure your texture quality is set to high.

IIRC that is a requirement to use alpha textures, and Visions preferences don't carry over from one version to another.

[Jesse Cogswell]

Quite right, that did the trick.  It might be a good thing to add to the Help documentation for either the Vision Preferences or Material Properties, or both.  And it would probably be a good idea to reverse the Use Alpha Channel property so that True allows the alpha channel to be used rather than False as it does now.

[bbudzon]

It is a little confusing... when Use Alpha Channel is not checked, then Vision will use the Alpha Texture (if one is present). If Use Alpha Channel is checked, then Vision will use the A from the RGBA image (ie; the alpha channel) instead. This was mainly a hold over from older versions of Vision which did not support using the A from the RGBA image; in older versions the only option was Alpha Texture.

 

This post has brought up some interesting topics and talking points, though! I think I can bring some of these ideas to my next meeting. Thanks again for your feedback @Jesse Cogswell 🙂 

[Jesse Cogswell]

Aha, I see now.  I guess I didn't realize that Vision could now use alpha textures natively as the main texture.  Neat.  But this still requires additional work from a VW export, as VW does not allow for alpha textures without using the transparency shader, right?

[bbudzon]

3 minutes ago, Jesse Cogswell said:

VW does not allow for alpha textures without using the transparency shader

I may be wrong, but at a quick glance this does seem to be the case. In order to get an alpha mask in VW, I believe the transparency shader must be used. I just didn't see any options for the primary image that allowed for masking with the alpha channel.

 

FWIW, the main reason this was originally added was for NDI Streams actually 😛  A customer was in a situation where they had to separate their single RGBA stream into an RGB stream and a separate stream for the alpha. When adding this new feature, not only was this easier for them to use a single RGBA stream but performance in Vision was better as well as we were not handling as many NDI input streams. It kind of "just so happened" that this also worked with the alpha channel from the image assigned to Texture 😂