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InaCentaur
Inspiring
May 7, 2025
Solved

How to upload a transparent texture and have it display on a plane with transparency?

How to upload a transparent texture and have it display on a plane with transparency?

MKETheGuru
Inspiring
May 8, 2025

Hi InaCentaur!

If your objective is to have a transparent plane that has any sort of visuals on it or is more than an invisible object serving as a collider, you do need to assign a material to the mesh outside of the Desktop Editor for it to work. Even if you have a texture asset that uses the alpha channel for transparency, applying it to a mesh that does not have a transparency-supporting material assigned to it will not produce transparency. The material names and texture file suffixes assigned to the meshes help inform the Worlds on how to unpack and display the texture information. You can find the materials guide here, and the materials to look for are the _Transparent, _Blend, and _Masked materials.
Happy creating!

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5 replies

SeeingBlue
Honored Contributor
May 7, 2025
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InaCentaur
Inspiring
May 7, 2025

actually i think my question is, do i need to upload a mesh if all i want is a plane (existing shape) with a transparent texture? 

SeeingBlue
Honored Contributor
May 7, 2025

Yes, but that also sounds like it could be accomplished with an object collider instead or an existing plane from the build menu with the visibility turned off.

If you want to upload and display an image with transparency in the image then we load it onto a mesh plane and import it.

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MKETheGuru
Inspiring
May 8, 2025

Hi InaCentaur!

If your objective is to have a transparent plane that has any sort of visuals on it or is more than an invisible object serving as a collider, you do need to assign a material to the mesh outside of the Desktop Editor for it to work. Even if you have a texture asset that uses the alpha channel for transparency, applying it to a mesh that does not have a transparency-supporting material assigned to it will not produce transparency. The material names and texture file suffixes assigned to the meshes help inform the Worlds on how to unpack and display the texture information. You can find the materials guide here, and the materials to look for are the _Transparent, _Blend, and _Masked materials.
Happy creating!

Upcoming Events : Build-Along - Sky’s The Limit - Create Stunning Custom Skydomes Tuesday June 3rd 11:00 AM PT - Register June Programming Calendar