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FSX (SP2) Transparency and drawing order

J

John Young

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158
Country
unitedkingdom
I have quite large areas of pine trees to place in a scenery I am working on. I built them from matrices where a long horizontal double sided plane is shared by 4 trees and each tree has a separate plane at right angles, to form 4 cruciforms. The basic building block is then cloned up and shaped according to the area needed. It works very well in FS9. Although there are 21,000 polygons in total, there are only 6 Gmax scenes for the blocks of trees and they all share 1 material (6 draw calls total) with 10 welded texture vertices in each. Performance hit is only 8 fps (from 83 fps) on a very complex scenery. There are no drawing order problems in FS9.

I want to use the same method in the FSX/SP2 version of the scenery, but when I convert the models and materials to FSX format, I get a drawing order/bleed through problem as in the screen shot below. The top half of the shot is a sample of the Gmax viewport looking down. I used ADE to place the trees but in the sim I get smaller sub sets of the trees superimposed over the main set that float around as I move around the scenery. The trees are also near a fence (obviously transparent in it's own right).

My material settings are:

2-sided
No specular bloom
Set Default transparent
Z-Test Alpha
Alpha Test Mode = greater
Assume Vertical Normal
No shadow
No Base material Specular
Double sided

The trouble is there are so many possible settings in the FSX Materials editor and I am not clear what does what. Is there a set of choices that would overcome this drawing order problem or is there something else I need to do please to anchor the trees and render them in the correct order?

Thanks in anticipation,

John
 

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