Transparency in DTS Shapes, Among Other Things...

#1 Hi Don,
I'm planning on writing up a tutorial for the transpernecy issue in the next month or so. But, in the meantime, maybe a summary will suffice, depending on how much you already know.

1. Make your texture image from your UV map, leaving areas that are transparent and semi-transparent. Then export as a 24-bit png.
2. Import the image into your uv window as normal.
3. In the material buttons window select alpha in the mapto tab, in addition to col, which should already be selected.
4. Then, in the 3d window, go into uv face select mode, select one face (making it the active face) and select the editing buttons tab and click the button that says alpha, instead of opaque.
5. Then hit AKEY to deselect -- the face will still have the colored outline but not the dotted outline -- that is, active but not selected.
6. Hit AKEY again to select all -- your original face is still the active face.
7. Then hit the copy drawmode button -- it'll apply the transparency to all the faces.
8. There's one other thing I can't remember right now before you export. I think, though, it is the same thing that applies to exporting any kind of texture with Blender. I'll look later. I checked and this is, I think, all you need to add transapency for exporting -- although you still need to follow the rules for basic texture exporting (hitting texface, turning off mipmap, naming your material correctly, etc.). The thing I think I was thinking about has to do with making nice renders in Blender, which is a very different thing.

Now my tut is half done, thanks.

Scott

#2 No MS#D importer, but export form MS as an OBJ and import.

#3 Oh, and Nigel Symes made some lovely tutorials for blender... not sure where his site is, but the files are - Here -

#4 Here is an example of a semi-transparent (albeit poorly textured) giant flask as seen in Torque that I did a while ago to test transparency. Also, I edited the above post now that I had a chance to look at my test file.


Scott

#5

Quote:
Oh, and Nigel Symes made some lovely tutorials for blender... not sure where his site is,

@Ryan - Thanks ;) BTW the central site for them is here:

www.users.on.net/~symes/gamedev/videotuts/videotuts.html

@Scott, what an awesome resource! I had only thought casually about transparencies but you've made them into reality... nice!

#6 We actually have my friend Terry to thank for that one -- I'm just retelling the tale. We have some tuts hanging out here:

www.lowpolycoop.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9

We hope to grow this over time -- you're tutorial work is awesome btw.

Scott

#7 Yeesh. Usually on other boards I get one "I don't know" post or two "Have you tried..." posts and it ends with that. :p

Thanks for the info. I'm going to try this out as soon as I can. I wanted to make breakable glass and a fighter jet cocpit viewport. If this works, things are really going to start moving from there.

#8 Just ran successfully through this. Didn't work until I removed the image from my materials.cs though :/

#9 That seems awfully complicated.
Do you have access to Paint Shop Pro? (I understand the process is almost identical for photoshop as well)If you can create an alpha map, you can simply set the texture as 'transparent' in the newest DTS blender exporter, and it determines the transparency based on the alpha blend. simply apply your alpha-enabled texture as a UV map, as usual.

so far it has worked extremely well for me for creating '2d' plane objects, such as grass, leaves, and decals. The functioning is a little odd for 3d objects unless you tell it to export as triangles and flip the face normals to interior, but that might only apply to objects that don't truly have 'interior' faces.