Problems with Opacity masking.

[Kry-Vin]

Hello, I am currently making a level for Unreal as part of a project assignment. Everything in our level must be made by us, no relying on epic's models or textures just to be handy. I'm ready to start piecing together the centerpiece of my level now, which is set in a shopping mall, but i have run into a snag with the material editor.

Essentially, i have these ramps which rise in a helix shape around a center piece in the middle of a central rotunda like space in my mall. Now on these ramps  have little plates of glass which are inbetween a handrail and the ramps themselves. now the problem is I am trying to make these glass plates transparent, but they are planes, so they would also need to be double sided. I have an opacity map with a gray area for my glass and followed both ways of doing the opacity that are in the first material editior tutorial that linked on this site.
However, with map linked to the  opacity channel, when i try to make it 2 sided, the material goes quite quirky and seems to go transparent all over. Also the downside with this way from what i can see is that since the diffuse is linked to the emmisive channel, it does not have any specularity, so my normal arn't doing anything.

 And with opacity mask, while it does completly knock out the black areas of my texture and keep the white, the areas that are Gray appear to be flickering. This method does seem to be leaning in the right direction, as my material has a shadow and the normals are doing their job.

So to put it simply, i need to find away to make a normal mapped material that has double sided semi-opage points. .

I hope you can help,
Thanks in advance.

[ElShotte]

My recommendation to you is read Hourences tutorial on the Material Editor, he covers transparent materials (with alpha channels as well, just as I suspected). You can find them by visiting the "Tutorials" section. Hope that helps.

[Kry-Vin]

I looked at them, though I didn't try using an alpha channel on the opacity mask. That may be the issue. Will try now and see if it works.

[ElShotte]

Good stuff, let us know how it goes.

[Kry-Vin]

Hmmm, i'm still facing the same issue as before. The opacity mask appears to provide an ok 2 sided material, and as before, white solid black completly see through. However the Gray area I have for my glass isn't working. It is still causing some flickering.
However I'm wondering now after reading the tutorial again. Is opacity mask only meant to be used for completly solid and completly opague materials. As in only white and black, is that what the complex alphas are referring to in the tutorial, and how they should be used on the Opacity rather then the mask?
Also, is there no way at all of using Opacity and keeping the emissive free? As the tutorial seems to have to you it.

See the reason I'm going about things this way is that I Uv'd all of these Ramps in max already with the Glass added in, which I regret doing now of course. But it took so much time to do that, and with a deadline looming, i would rather work with what I have gotten myself stuck with.

[ElShotte]

You could always analyze a material already there in one of the UT3 levels and use that as an example man, try that map (dont know if I remember correctly) called Phobos, or thats what it was called in original UT, the one which takes place on a space station.

[genroxbro]

Hi, 
I want make a website about one company, but I met some difficulties in the Poll Content. I create New Poll, I wrote the poll, then I apllied and saved. I publish the new created poll and unpublished the existent one, but on website it doesnt appear.   Why?    I follow all the instruction according to a book, but unsuccesfull. Please, help me
_____________________________________
Website I designed for payroll loans company.

[genroxbro]

Each poll has a name, once you create a new poll you need to link the module displaying the poll to the one you want to display, or create a new poll module.

Go to the module manager and select the mod_poll entry
In the Parameters select the new poll
Make sure the module is Enabled

Click Save
_____________________________________
Website I designed for quick payday loan company.

[Toobre]

It works on mine too. I cant see any reason why it wouldnt its not as if youre using javascript, its just a link to another page.

Did they say what didnt work?