Question about parachutes

[Angelo Kerman]

Hey all,

I'm trying to model a parachute and have run into an interesting problem. I've created the risers as a cone with transparent sides (via a PNG), opaque only where the risers are. The cone is a separate mesh from the canopy. When I look at the cone from below, it seems to prevent the canopy underside from rendering. I know that the risers are the issue because without them, the canopy renders just fine from underneath. Has anybody seen this before?

I'm pretty sure it's a materials issue, I am using KSP/Alpha/Cutoff Bumped as the material for the riser texture. Maybe there's a setting I missed?

[NecroBones]

Huh, I was about to suggest making making sure you're on "KSP/Alpha/Cutoff", but I see you're doing that. I haven't tried transparent meshes with the bumped version though.

The inside of your meshes- How are you making the polygons "double sided"? If you doubled up the polygons with opposite normals, I'd expect the cutoff shader to behave normally (But I'm really too much of a noob with shaders to suggest anything beyond that). This is what I did with some of the internal structure of my launch clamp towers (doubled polygons, KSP/alpha/cutoff, etc):

[sumghai]

Your transparent png on the cone mesh is telling the game not to render anything behind it, including the underside of the canopy.

Personally, when I make parachute risers, I prefer to model them individually as very-thin low-poly (six-sided) cylinders, so that I can see the other risers and the other side of the canopy - in Blender, I would model one riser, stretch it out / angle it as needed and then perform a rotational array operation to duplicate the riser as many times as required around the vertical axis.

[Angelo Kerman]

Ahh ok, I was wondering about that. I know Squad made their risers as a cone with a transparency, so I was trying to duplicate that. See:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/4463-Transparent-parts?p=55374&highlight=Parachute#post55374

i'll give the risers as meshes a try, thanks for the suggestion.

[sumghai]

Ahh ok, I was wondering about that. I know Squad made their risers as a cone with a transparency, so I was trying to duplicate that. See:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/4463-Transparent-parts?p=55374&highlight=Parachute#post55374

i'll give the risers as meshes a try, thanks for the suggestion.

That's outdated info, circa 2011.

The latest SQUAD parachutes have risers as meshes - I know this because I used taniwha's Blender .mu importer script to examine the official models myself.

[Angelo Kerman]

Good to know, thank you much! Totally explains a lot.