No Texture Transparency
by Mark Dynna · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 01/31/2007 (7:25 am) · 4 replies
I did some searches on this but I couldn't find anything on this for TGEA. Are texture transparencies broken for Materials? Does something special need to be done? We are using PNG's for many of our plant textures, and when I loaded them in PhotoShopt to take a look, PS showed a "transparent background" on them. Now, I'm no artist by any stretch, so I don't know if this constitutes the required "alpha channel" or not. I do know that prior to MS4 when Materials became required, they did have transparency, but since we've implemented Materials, they no longer have transparency.
#2
I would also like to add, for anyone who has the authority to add new features to the engine, it would be really nice if DTS texture transparency worked a little more "natively." After reading that thread, it looked like a lot of "guess and test" monkey-wrenching needs to be done to get it to work.
01/31/2007 (7:50 am)
Ok, this seems to show that you need to set the Material's Translucent property to TRUE. I can kind of understand that, setting emissive = TRUE, puzzles me though. I suppose setting that just gets rid of other potential problems with false shading and such.I would also like to add, for anyone who has the authority to add new features to the engine, it would be really nice if DTS texture transparency worked a little more "natively." After reading that thread, it looked like a lot of "guess and test" monkey-wrenching needs to be done to get it to work.
#3
Or DDS ditto, but at least photoshop TGA stuff works.
01/31/2007 (11:05 am)
Actually, it'd be nice if the engine supported TGA instead of PNG, because PNG's are constantly causing issues like "do I really have a transparency or not" things..Or DDS ditto, but at least photoshop TGA stuff works.
#4
ResourceManager is queried first, which will return a .dds file since its in the path, etc.... There is no construct function for DDS files, so it will just error and continue on its way. We moved the block that handles DDS files to a different spot to alleviate that and it was decent, but lighting doesn't seem to be the same with DDS.
I spent a good bit of time with different formats of DDS textures for Diffuse and Normal maps. The end result was pretty decent, but there were numerous lighting related things, but the Z height was being calculated in the shaders to alleviate some artifacts and that seemed to throw things for a loop
the TGA resource from way back when still works just fine, so we're doing all TGA for now, as theyll zip down fairly small in the end.. and we're using PNG still for GUI, but that will probably change
01/31/2007 (2:42 pm)
The engine does support DDS, but theres some issues when it comes to being loaded, because of the order of how the files are looked for. ResourceManager is queried first, which will return a .dds file since its in the path, etc.... There is no construct function for DDS files, so it will just error and continue on its way. We moved the block that handles DDS files to a different spot to alleviate that and it was decent, but lighting doesn't seem to be the same with DDS.
I spent a good bit of time with different formats of DDS textures for Diffuse and Normal maps. The end result was pretty decent, but there were numerous lighting related things, but the Z height was being calculated in the shaders to alleviate some artifacts and that seemed to throw things for a loop
the TGA resource from way back when still works just fine, so we're doing all TGA for now, as theyll zip down fairly small in the end.. and we're using PNG still for GUI, but that will probably change
Torque Owner Fucifer
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=55433