Jeanfeels

This is something I've been trying, and failing, to do in Eden using the Go-Kart as a testbed. I've read that there's all sorts of quirks regarding pbo files, hidden textures, and rvmat editing, which I tried to figure out, but so far the best I've managed is a mod that straight up breaks the karts dlc when installed (lmao, go figure). I had found a mod in researching this that adds a "cloak" system, but it has a lot of incompatability, hides the driver and passengers, and isn't really what I need. I found a few threads also that play around with the in-editor global texture and material editing, as well as procgen textures, but it seems the base kart model has no translucency/transparency information which leads to every attempt I've made failing in interesting ways, by seemingly causing the textures to display but doing so with weird z-buffer effects that cause the rearmost textures to be on top. See image. What ideally I would like to do is figure out how to make an MP-compatible, generic invisible vehicle that shows the driver just sitting on thin air. ideally I'd make a go kart style one and an offroad type with a passenger seat, but I've run into a brick wall of sorts where nothing i try works and part of that is likely my limited understanding of modding arma, which has so far been very frustrating and cryptic with a lot of assumed knowledge i simply don't have yet. Is it easier to start from scratch and just reference animations from existing vehicles somehow? or is it easier to take an existing vehicle, extract the textures and model, and figure out how to add a completely transparent version as a mod? or is this a fool's errand that i should just give up on? or maybe this is something i should post in the subforum dedicated to seeking out or commissioning mods? please offer whatever advice you have access to. Thank you for your time.

So this is a little complex for me to explain but I'll try to be clear. I'm still relatively new to arma 3, though I've done a good amount in arma 2 it was mostly quite basic. I have an AO in mind which would have a target or targets plus some false positives/red herrings scattered across a large area. I want to have a helo run a search pattern where it flies low, on a dead straight heading, slows to turn for the next pass, lining up properly for the next pass so it doesn't drift out of alignment, and repeats for each lane of the search grid. Even though i could probably do this with a metric buttload of manual waypoints, i wanted to check first if there is a better way to automate a lawnmower-esque search pattern being flown, especially given how helicopters seem to view waypoints as more of a suggestion than an actual rule unless you set their speed and altitude very low, which they sometimes fail to respect anyway. The helo wouldn't have to do anything about spotting targets of course since i can just have a trigger at the helo's altitude to order ground units to investigate, that bit isn't so much the issue as is making the ai follow a convincing search pattern without manually adding every single checkpoint or shrinking the ao. Though it would also be nice to have a way to make a trigger that selected a group not currently on task dynamically from the list of available groups to assign to each area of interest, without having to manually make one group for every location or faking it by having each group pre-assigned a handful of locations such that they immediately move to the next one, regardless of whether the helo has passed it, once they clear the first one. tbh I'm probably going to lower the scope of this but i want to get out of my comfort zone and learn new techniques and maybe unlearn some bad habits i picked up in arma 2 and this feels like a good excuse to do so. I'm very open to different approaches and ideas to modify or rethink this, as well as suggestions on exercises to look into.