Thanks!

Thanks, this is great. The other fps config settings not listed people need to run these, came across them googling.

Have two small issues using these transparent viewmodels. Not sure if its due to my games settings, using rayshud, or just the limitations of this viewmodel trick.

Certain weapons lack transparency and instead add a dark transparent overlay on top of the entire screen like this shot. Also noticed it happens with the Iron Bomber. Not sure if anyone else is experiencing this.

When spectating someone in third person the screen has that same dark overlay.

Thanks for linking me that, updated original post. As for dark transparent overlay: I've never seen that, my guess from your post is that it involves newer weapons using different textures that aren't rendered transparent through this method. I have no real factual theory though.

I've had the dark overlay appear for me on certain weapons (some being stock even if I remember right) or in certain locations looking certain directions while and after taunting (it's weird), but always still got the same transparent viewmodels. I shrugged it off while I was working on it because I didn't see it doing all that much and everything still worked just fine for me.

I'm running comanglia's config so it's probably yet another issue involving settings.

EDIT: after using -Icaria-'s extra settings, I can't seem to replicate it anymore.

Yea, it was just the intel/payload glow option that was causing that overlay on some weapons and spectator. (even heavy's stock fists oddly enough) I just put glow_outline_effect_enable 0 in my autoexec so i remember to keep it off. Thanks again for the transparent viewmodels and this thread Jarate/komo.

Just thought I should mention that mat_antialias isn't necessary to set to 0 in order to function, at least wasn't for me. I was managing to set the textures transparent on sv_pure 1 servers, but not on pure 2, not until the last edit where you added these commands:

Now it's working regardless of sv_pure but setting mat_antialias to any value besides 0 doesn't brake it. I can live with all other commands set to the values specified, but no AA is just unbearable for me.

Thanks for sharing this!

Sorry for the bump, but I can't figure out any solutions for this following issue: There seems to be a consistent and subtle blur at all times.
The translucent viewmodels seem to work perfectly fine on every map with no issues.

I have no performance configs and most settings remain un-modified from vanilla TF2. The following is in my autoexec.cfg:

The blur, as I said, is pretty subtle. It becomes more intense if I make the viewmodels more translucent by modifying the .vtf. Here is a zoomed comparison with the roof of pl_barnblitz with anti-aliasing disabled:

http://i.imgur.com/a3vCatP.png

and here is an album to flip between the full images: http://imgur.com/a/vpgQt#1
...as I said, it is subtle. It is most visible on the crates and chainlink.

As far as I know, refracts will always add a 1-0.5px blur, even with no distortion and with blur set to 0.0. Since it is translucent though, it ends up being even more subtle than that.

Unless someone's got another console command that'll fix it, I'm pretty sure it's just something you'd have to live with. You can, as you sorta said, make the viewmodel more opaque to get less of a blur, but that's not really a full solution.

I have a problem, it doesnt work.. the viewmodels. i put the txt in the hudlayout.res, i put the 2 files in the thumbnail, i dont know what is wrong!!!

Did you put the needed commands in the autoexec?

mat_motion_blur_enabled 1 //afaik the only sure-fire way to keep refract masking on
mat_motion_blur_strength 0 //effectively disables motion blur, personal choice + motion blur gets masked and looks bad with refract masking
mat_disable_bloom 1 //disables bloom so refract masking doesn't create a dark rectangle over light materials
mat_hdr_level 0
mat_colcorrection_disableentities 1
mat_colorcorrection 0

dx8?

For some reason I'm getting a huge white screen that only disappears when I go into the menu. I'm using 7HUD-master and many other configs. Does anyone know how to fix this?

use dx9 you guys have to read!!!

ty. Turns out I had -dxlevel 98 at beggining of my launch options and 81 at end so I removed the first one on accident

EDIT: Still getting it :\
EDIT2: Changed it in-game, works

Getting this too, thought it was just me. Sucks that there's no fix, it's pretty make or break.

EDIT: I've figured it out. It's not entirely the refract shader. Your image can be edited to decrease the effect.

The way you're gaining transparency is by throwing a refract shader over the entire viewport, although it ignores the HUD and alters the viewmodel. The refract shader is actually warping the entire image as a side effect. You've disabled the blur associated with the refract shader by setting $refractamount to 0, however the refract shader still warps the image a linear, pixel-driven amount. Because of this, the blur we're seeing is actually from the low resolution of the overlay. By increasing the resolution, we can't actually remove the blur, but we can exponentially make it less visible.

I resized the 256x256 image to 2048x2048. The blur effect is still there, but it's hardly visible.

Having some issues getting the 256px to even load right now, but I'll show screenshots in a second.

EDIT2: I have no idea what I did to break my game like this. The aliasing was REALLY bad when it was 256px. I increased it to 2048x2048 and used "mat_reloadmaterial REFRACTnormal_transparent" without even leaving the server, after turning sv_cheats on, and then the blur became really subtle, but still there.

I've since deleted the 2048px image and wiped both the vmt and vtf with the original ones from the archive, restarted tf2 a bunch of times, and no matter what I do I can't get the blur to be any worse than it was at 2048px.

I thought I was on to something when it came to getting it to work on DX8. I thought by simply generating a Du/dv map and adding a $dudvmap section to the material, I could enable it in DX8 mode.

Turns out the real reason it won't work in DX8 is because DX8 doesn't support motion blur. So, basically, the refract shader DOES work in DX8 (though possibly not as well), but because there's no motion blur, we can't apply the refract shader to the viewmodel.

It's never gunna be possible to get it running in DX8 mode with this method. Sorry guys.

So during kill cams and spectating, and when hiding my viewmodel, I get a slight darkening of my screen. This is extremely annoying as on sniper I hide my viewmodel. I tried playing with the transparent viewmodel, and I still can't stand it.

Anyone have a fix for this?

I'd love to continue to use this, but this is a dealbreaker.

Has to do with the cart/intel glow cvar.

You'll have to set the weapons you use with viewmodels on to turn the cart glow on and weapons with viewmodels off to disable the cart glow, if you want to use both.

I seem to be having a white screen issue with my settings. Using Rayshud and I put -dx9 in the launch options after having people tell me that is the command the force dx level 9. (I was sure I was using it before but somehow I still get a issue that shouldn't happen unless I use dx level 8) I am using Rayshud and I looked in my graphics config but nothing conflicts in terms of dx level or the commands for the transparent viewmodels. Anyone have any idea what could be causing the issue.

I'll post a link to all the relevant configs below if someone wants to take a look see cause I can't seem to find the issue.
Viewmodel (weapon switching setup)
Autoexec (this finishes the setup for weapon switching)
Graphics config (I basically just messed with Chris and Comanglia a bit cause my friend who I originally made the config prefered for some things to be on.)
Note that I was trying to toggle transparency while also toggling the viewmodels themselves. (The transparency should be off while the viewmodels are off and if I turn on the viewmodel for my secondary or primary the transparency is on. However on my melee the viewmodel is on but no transparency.)

I will see if it works better when I use a clean Comanglia config.

Is it possible to have a bind to enable and/or disable these?
I don't understand how this works very well, so I wouldn't be able to come up with something myself. I have a shitty potato Mac (because my PC laptop is broken), so on certain maps it's laggy. I really like the way it look, so I was wondering if anyone could come up with a solution for me, or link me to a solution you know of.

"visible_minmode" "0"
"enabled_minmode" "0"
"image_minmode" "null"

Adding this to TransparentViewmodelMask should let you toggle it, assuming your hud doesn't change in different minmode settings already.

There's also the achievement tracker option if your hud does use different minmode settings, but I'm not sure how that'd work with what's loaded and whatnot so that option might end up resulting in the same lag.

When I tried to do this I got and error saying

KeyValues Error: RecursiveLoadFromBuffer: got } in key in file scripts/HudLayout.res
Resource/HudLayout.res, TransparentViewmodelMask, 1, (*if_mvm*),
KeyValues Error: RecursiveLoadFromBuffer: got EOF instead of keyname in file scripts/HudLayout.res
Resource/HudLayout.res, (*TransparentViewmodelMask*), (*1*), (*if_mvm*),

I'm using Star_'s modified broesel hud.
Can anyone help?

No real idea but that error message sounds to me like you messed up a bracket in HudLayout.res. Can you put your hudlayout into a pastebin and post the link to the pastebin here?

You usually get this error if you have an unclosed curly brace ( { or } ) somewhere.

thanks

So there's a problem I've been having with class images, and I'm kinda hoping someone can help me out with this, because it also involves textures and transparency. I run tf2 in dx8.1, which means texture transparency is a problem. Normally that doesn't bother me, but the class images turn transparent when you cloak, which doesn't work for dx8.1, so this is what happens: Uncloaked vs. Cloaked. Is there a way to use the texture thingies to make it so that the class images don't turn transparent (or fail to turn transparent, in my case)

Doesn't seem to be working for me anymore after the Gun Mettle update.

I used to have it working with DX9 and all the changes etc. Anybody got a fix?

Did you by any chance tried updating the HUD and forgot to readd the code in the new version?

Works for me

I've updated rayshud to the latest version for Gun Mettle, so the files were replaced. It should work now. Thanks!