Transparent/Specular material problem

Transparent/Specular material problem
Posted: 02:17 AM 35 Minutes Ago
Hello guys.

I am having a hard time figuring out something.. hopefully someone can give me some tips.

The problem is that I need a GameObject with a specular material to gradually turn invisible.
For that, I am trying to use Transparent/Specular standard shader. However, I can never make it into a completely opaque object. It does get transparent, even though I set colour to full opacity. On the other hand, if I use the regular Specular material, I get the looks that I want. But I am not able to gradually make it invisible.



So as you can see, one is opaque, the other is transparent, even though Main Color alpha is set to 255.

I do not intend to write shader code, unless it is strictly necessary.

Can anyone suggest me a workaround for that?

Best regards

 

Use a standard non-transparent shader when it should be opaque, then switch to a transparent shader when you need to fade it out.

--Eric

 

Eric.

As much as this idea looks good, what will happen is that once I do this switching, the object will "pop" into this transparent, giving a rough material switching. I really want to avoid this kind of ugly impressions.

 

So my post has been moved?
Even though it is not directly related to writing shaders?

 

You need to move the insides to a separate mesh. For transparent materials, the triangles need to be sorted from back to front to render correctly, but since this is a lot of unnecessary work in most cases (not to mention its not a trivial thing to do), only the meshes are sorted this way.

 

Dolkar. Thanks for the advice.
They are all different meshes, actually. The object can assemble/disassemble.

I am thinking about placing an alpha slide through code on the material shader for the "regular" specular. Anyone think that might be a solution?

 

Hmm.. anyways, the problem is with the fact that the meshes cant be properly sorted... Oh, I see! They share the same position, so the meshes don't get sorted either! Can't think of a solution on the spot though...

 

You can manually sort the render order with Material.renderQueue.

 

Ah, that is great to know, guys! I really appreciate it.

I will take this opportunity to make another question:
Is there a way I can get the standard specular shader code, and add an alpha slider to it, via coding? Or would I just get another version of transparent specular shader?

 

You can add a slider and name it "Alpha", sure... but it won't to anything. To get it to control transparency, you'd get what is already the transparent specular shader.

 

Guys... still haven't come across to anything that could actually solve my problem?

Is it the case that I am trying to achieve something that is not possible with unity (that is, using a specular material and make it turn gradually into invisible, without having z-buffer problems?)

 

You should be getting the same problems with any other transparent shader, specular or not. If everything works fine with others, there's something really fishy going on.