Im still having the disappearing act going on with my geo... I thought maybe it was a 2011 bug, but it does it just as bad in 2012. Someone suggested making sure that polygon transparency sorting was on, which I looked up how to do online and sounded like it would fix the issue, but no luck. The description of what it does is exactly whats going on in my scene... The objects that have any sort of transparency map attached to the shader seem to appear behind the objects behind them.. but it all changes depending on the camera angle. Here are some screenshots.. been fighting with this for a couple weeks now.. if anyone has any more suggestions please help.. Another thought that has come up is if it might be my video card. (ATI Radeon HD 4670 with 256MB VRAM). I have 16GB of RAM on my machine but Im not sure how to allocate more to Maya?? Is that possible and if so how?? Thanks!

Alpha sorting has always been a pain in the ass.

One thing you can try to do is make sure that the transparent object is its own mesh, and not part of a larger mesh (i.e. if you have a car with transparent windows...make the windows a seperate mesh with a transparent shader) Alpha sorting on a complex object that is partially transparent is pretty awful.

AS I said in the other thread, there isn't a nice way to get round this in the Maya viewport. What's the intended use of this scene? Is it going into a game engine?