Invisible texmap pattern

[Joshua Delahunty]

This part

is now present at the Part Tracker, but the TEXMAP pattern is not visible from behind, when I use it in LDCad, on a transparent part.


Is it possible to combine a TEXMAP pattern with a BFC NOCLIP ?
If so, how should a correct file syntax look like?

This thread encouraged me to take stock of current TEXMAP support among the renderers I know of.

FOUNDRY
Foundry allowed the transparency of the part to "transfer" to the opaque portions of the texture, and so made the texture transparent; this was a bug.  Foundry was fixed through use of a "double render" fix.  I expect that a true fix will only come with multi-texturing (though I'm not speaking to that as an expert by any means).  The fact that our proof-of-concept framework app for TEXMAP didn't do this right was concerning.

Unfortunately, this fix did "break" the ability to see the texture from "behind" the transparent part.  The rendering pipeline is being worked on in Foundry, and we hope to get both of those working, plus implementation of shaders to continue to add rendering features.

STUD.IO
Stud.io does not appear to support texture mapping at this time.  The LDRAW directory they use does not feature a parts/textures/ directory.

BRICKSMITH
Bricksmith renders the opaque portions of the texture transparently, and does not show the texture "through" the transparent part.
NOTE: I'm pretty sure Bricksmith only does PLANAR at this point.

LDCAD
I'm not able to test LDCad from my Mac.  I understand that things are better, but the true improvement will come with LDCad 2.0?
LDCAD is the only package supporting CYLINDRICAL and SPHERICAL mapping at this time.

LEOCAD
LeoCAD had its issues when I started testing (it would actually crash on TEXMAP references; whereas an earlier version had worked fine).  Leo fixed that, plus has it rendering opaque portions opaquely, and you can see the texture through the part from the "back."

There are still some sorting issues that occur occasionally, so if you have a TEXMAPped part behind a transparent TEXMAPped part, sometimes from certain angles the TEXMAP of the background part will render fully opaquely in the foreground.  I had to hunt to see this issue, personally.

Generally, though, LeoCAD currently has the best render, which if I'm not mistaken is partially because he's doing shader operations to get it to work. LDCad 2.0 is due to do this as well, I think?

Leo is working towards CYLINDRICAL and SPHERICAL mapping next, and is considering OBI (a different but similarly designed feature) as well.