Help with transparent textures

posted on June 24th, 2013, 10:02 am

Hi all, I have made a shipyard that needs to have sections of the texture transparent (like most star trek type yards).

I have added a alpha to the texture and I export it as a a2 sod file but ingame te black sections of the texture that I want transparent still show.

How do I fix this?

Cheers

posted on June 24th, 2013, 4:20 pm

Which program are you using to export? I am going to assume Ms3d for now, since that's more commonly available.

A2 SODs by default use alpha layers for lightmaps. The easiest way to use an alpha for transparency, for me anyway, is to simply export as an A1 SOD. They work just as well in A2, and natively use alphas as transparency.

You can't use both on a single model though, AFAIK. It's either lightmaps or transparencies, not both.

posted on June 24th, 2013, 4:35 pm

If you need some parts of the model to have both transparency and glows (lightmaps), you can split the model into two parts (meshes): one that doesn't have any glows, and one that only has glowing parts. Both parts can have various degrees of transparencies.

- Give meshes a material node the following if you need to use the alpha channel for transparency:

Code: Select all

"c_tm_alpha"

To do this, attach another bone/joint/node to the mesh and name it as needed. You can find a whole list of possible modes in the guide (ie, additive, alpha, fog, etc).


- Create a second material for the mesh that has glows.

- Set the ambient lighting component for the second material (with glows) to full white. You can set a colour other than white if you want it to glow in some specific colour.

This way you can still export using the A2 exporter.
Apologies if my terminology differs from what you see in Milkshape

posted on June 24th, 2013, 9:06 pm

I am using ms3d yes. I have got round it by using the 'noalpha' material tag. Seems to work 4 now. I will make a few tweeks and test again.

posted on June 25th, 2013, 3:02 pm

This is what I have for now