Hey fellas, i'm painting hair in photoshop, then saves them as 32bit targas. when it brought it into maya, i noticed that meshes that i'm working with shows up in front of other meshes with alpha channes, even though they're in the back of it. any of you have this problem or knows how to fix it?
Well, if you don't want an alpha channel, I would say save the texture as a 24-bit TGA.
Other than that, go to the material in the AE and then to Hardware Texturing/TextureQuality. Set it to highest. It will cost you a little time on load depending on the size of your map, but it will make the shader opaque in the viewport.
--JeffD
I'm having the same problem with a bush. I don't think it's the face behind another face showing through the alpha but the texture on the face reversing. If you spin your object you can see what I mean. Changing the texture quality in Hardware Rendering won't help. One thought I had was to paint in black the alpha'd area on the color texture. (can't remember the term used when you double up the alpha area like that.) Problem here is it's hard to figure out if your object looks correct when viewing it in hardware mode. If anyone has any thought on fixing this display problem let me know. antel13@pacbell.net and AOLIMessenger: frstrtr1376
i have the same problem too!! and i cant solve it!
Sorting is a big concern with all 3D apps.
I know Maya is sensitive about double sided planes, especially if you duplicate and flip. Enable backface culling and try working with single planes as long as possible. I usually double them when I am all but set to export - it's quite simple to just select all the polys via the multilister and duplicate and flip em all that way.
Another solution is to have planes a separate objects in some kind of hierarchy - Maya sorts better that way. 4.5 is supposed to better at this too but I'm still on 4.02 so I wouldn't know.
Good luck!
Try this:
ToggleTransSort 0;
My trees now sort correctly according to hierachy 
To put it back to Maya default,
ToggleTransSort 1;
Im using 4.01
Brad.
EDITED TO ADD:
I dont use backface culling.. too slow.. instead pick the meshes you want, then type this into the script editor then MMB drag to your shelf:
$list = ls -sl;
for( $obj in $list)
{
$str = "setAttr "" + $obj + ".doubleSided" 0";
catch(eval($str));
}
This turns off double sided for render stats (in render and gfx views) voila.
use in conjunction with toggleTransSort and you too can have alphas that sort
Can you track down where the "ToggleTransSort" command is, I try it, and get an error, and a search through all the mel scripts included turns up no reference in any internal command with that name.
Is this perhaps a script you downloaded?
Hi Mike, you'll find it in: model editor sort transparency
modelEditor -e -st
I cant post the entire script due to it being copyright of my company..
It was done in house by one of our coders after a request from me.
I just tested it and recently been "decoding" it to try and understand it.
In my experience, a workaround for this is to use a second, seperate greyscale image for your transparancy map.
not overly efficient (or practical in some situations), but it seems to work.
you do understand thet the last oher entry on thge thread is from 3 years ago.
hehahah.. well to be honest, this forum could do with the odd post now and again to stop it atrophying... even if it is just a reply to an archaic post.. 
Werll yes but its not much usefull if the problemset people have is result of a bug/ not reading the whats new section so its not realy valid for newer maya versions wichh default for what most people exepect settings in this area.
problem solved with maya8 o/