Bit of a weird problem that I feel I should know the answer to.

I have a number of models that have transparent areas (e.g torn cloth, hair). I'm rendering them all with the same shader in XNA. Some of them appear correctly, others don't: the transparent areas 'overwrite' the pixels beneath them (like when you don't sort the depths of models with transparency). But given that it is within the same model (all uses a single texture), I'm not sure how to solve it. Why do some models render correctly and others don't?

I'm guessing it's just an accident that those polys happen to be rendered in a bad order.

Thoughts and solutions?

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for the quick reply BigGiantHead (nice name)

I was hoping to find a solution that wouldn't need different textures. You suggested that on the same texture you'd have to constantly reorder the polys each time but this doesn't seem to be necessary with those models that are already working. I assume that just means that on those models, the transparent parts are in a different ModelMeshPart that is rendered later than the others (are they grouped like that?) If that's the case, how do you arrange them so they're rendered in the correct order?

Worst case scenario I might just be lazy and model polys around the transparent edges. I'm fairly low poly so it'd be manageable.

Well I've solved it. Not entirely sure what was going on but the behaviour of these transparent parts made had me speculating that there was just some simple material options that could fix it (and I was right).

I'm working in 3ds max. Separated the model into opaque and transparent models. Applied the same texture (in 2 dif instances) to each model and then recombined them. Problem solved, works fine.

I'm guessing this forced XNA to interpret the model as having 2 ModelMeshParts instead of 1?

Thanks for the input all the same!