What is this graphic mystery (at least for me :) )

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Someone can explain me this graphic behavior ?
From a tower view .. when the plane is at some distance the canopy lost his transparency.
When more near the tower view point .. the transparency is there again ..
Note:
The view with blacked canopy was a zoomed .. as the plane was far.
The other view is with no zoom (plane near tower point)
This gltche is a spoiler when I make videos :(

Near tower

http://i43.tinypic.com/w7iuyx.jpg


Far from tower

http://fr.tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2cei1aa&s=5http://i41.tinypic.com/2cei1aa.jpg

[PRB]

When flying in Multi-player, I often see other planes un-textures when they are far away. The textures appear as it gets closer. Not sure if these is a setting to control the distance at which textures start showing, but your situation appears to be similar...

[Mick]

I believe it must be a multi-LOD model. Multiple levels of detail allow the sim to display a different model with less detail when you get further from the plane. That way your system isn't using processing power to create a plane in full detail when it's so far away that you can't see any detail. As the distance to the plane increases, the levels get less detailed, until when the plane's so far away that all you see is a dot, your computer only needs to give it enough graphic power to display that dot.

Great in theory, but in practice the sim often kicks down a level of detail (LOD) when the plane's still too close to your viewpoint, so the loss of detail becomes visible and pokes you in the eye.

In your example, at some level of detail the model doesn't have a transparent canopy. You're not supposed to see that LOD until the plane's so far away that you couldn't tell that the canopy's opaque, but the sim's showing that LOD when the plane's too close to you.

I don't think there's anything you can do about it.

An analogous situation prevails with textures; they can also be multi-LOD, but with texture files we speak of mip-maps. A mip-mapped texture file has multiple LODs that are meant to be used on the various LOD models. And as with models, the sim often renders textures at an LOD low enough that their lack of detail is visible. With textures you can just open the textures in DXTbmp and save them without mips.

Idea: this is a long shot, but check to see if the canopy is transparent in the model or with the alpha channel of the canopy texture. If the transparency is only in the textures, then save the texture file without mips and see if that solves the problem.