Blending

[Alienhead]

Greets! back for my nightly question lol..  After a day of coding and art working I always have something to ask.   This time its regarding alpha blending. I'll post the pic to better explain -

 

You may notice the brick of hay,  the ends are jaggey due to the Alpha Masking shader..  Normally, as I'm sure you know , most would prefer to alpha blend this instead of masking.  I guess this is a long shot but I'll ask anyways, are there alpha blending capabilities in LE ?  Going by the demos and the trees that come with the engine they all seem to be masked, so im guessing no?  

Oh to save posting another thread - i setup my vegi trees identitcal to the pine tree default in the engine, and still no shader sway movement on the limbs/tree leaves.  Do i need a special uv map layer or something to get it working ?

Oh, one last thing - today I created a plane in max, Im using it for distant particle effects so my routine is loading / copying new instances of the plane and script through run time. I noticved today that each of these are sharing the same variables and what not.  Even though I have them loaded up in entirely different scenes. Im wondering if that is nature behavior or have I overlooked something. 

[havenphillip]

Leadwerks can do that. You want to make sure your hay texture is a png rather than a jpg because apparently jpgs don't carry alpha information. The "discard" technique in the diffuse + alpha shader is what creates that hard alpha falloff. I think I understand what you're saying and if so then you might also try opening the hay material and setting the blend mode to alpha and checking the Z-sort box (then save). My usual move is to do this then replace the "discard" line with a mix and a mask. But you can see a smooth alpha blend in the picture below (though actually I did use a mask on that one). That may work for what I think you're trying to do (but you'll notice it eliminates the shadowing, which can then be replaced with a Blinn-Phong. I can help you out with it if you want).

 

Also (shameless self-promotion) I put up a bunch of shaders on my blog. There's some swaying trees and masks and blending etc. Maybe you'll find some principles there for some of these kind of shader problems.