Model Viewer transparency issue, ideas how to fix it(?)

[Healisoulus]

This has been bugging me (and I'm pretty sure some other users too) for quite some time, even though not as much as some other SFM's issues, but anyway: you may have noticed that some models are barely visible in the model viewer when you browse them, here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/ltEvJ

I also know there is an old post regarding this, but that one didn't go far: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1840/discussions/0/1698294337770274482/

After doing some research and testing, I've come to the conclusion that it is due to $alphatest and/or $translucent attributes present in the model's VMT. Removing those attributes from the VMT fixes the issue visibly, but only for the model with that VMT.

To dig a little further, my guess is that the problem is the way the model viewer "interprets" VMTs. I had an idea of creating a simple but useful addon that would somehow fix this issue, but personally my experience with Python is minimal and I've never touched any of SFM's system files, so this is why I'm trying to bring this up to more people.

If you have any ideas/suggestions or know who to reach out to regarding creating custom addons, please let me know. This isn't urgent, but such an addon would be very nice to have.

[Tiretracker]

In cases like that you can tick the wireframe mode to get a better look at what you're highlighting in model viewer. Naturally once you spawn it it will look as it should.

If there's any hope of "fixes" to these problems, you'll probably have to wait for whatever I hear going on involving a formal release of Source 2 Filmmaker. Which I think will actually feature content thumbnails like in Gmod rather than a memory-consuming model viewer.

[Healisoulus]

Originally posted by Tiretracker:

content thumbnails like in Gmod rather than a memory-consuming model viewer.

There is a community-made Asset Browser - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2918590103 , which is I guess something similar to what you had in mind here, but it doesn't create asset thumbnails automatically, nor does it allow you to "preview" the model (aka rotating it in the viewer), I believe.

I would simply like to get rid of the transparency issue in SFM's model viewer universally, that's pretty much it.

[Healisoulus]

Game Zombie discovered a solution for this issue (back in 2022): all you need to do is go to game/platform/resource/ folder, open boxrocket.res with any text editor (even Notepad works), and replace the value of Panel.BgColor with "IfmMenuDark", by default it's set to "Blank" (most likely it will be at line 141). After that restart SFM and the issue will most likely be fixed.