Nvidia photoshop plugin and where does the alpha channel go?

#1 Transparency goes in the Diffuse alpha. Spec goes in the Normal alpha - unless you're using _NM compression then it has to be a seperate file. Something you can get away with a Normal using DXT5, but anything, spotty, grainy, curved, or with diagonal lines will get mangled by the compression.

Quote: too many channels (5)

Do you have multiple layers in the RGB setting? Try merging them into one layer, so that RGB has only one layer. You might have to play around with some of the DDS exporter settings too, I'm not sure on that.

edit: And check that the background is a locked colour and not transparent itself.

#2 yeah it had something to do with being a psd I guess. It was already flattened but still wouldn't work. I saved it out as a .tif file and then opened that back up and it exported fine. seems like a bug. especially since I have have a file with 20 layer and export to DDS fine just so long as it doesn't have a alpha. I would have to say it has got to be a bug in the dds exporter.

#3 If you're saving a PNG, the alpha is the combined transparency of all your layers, not a separate channel you can edit. The most you can do with the default PNG plugin is use a layer mask, which allows you to edit the transparency and the color independently.

#4 yeah I know but PNG has not been involved in the process

#5 @Manoel

Actually it depends on which PNG plugin you are using to save. The default Photoshop PNG plugin works sort of like you describe (it still saves an alpha channel but it uese it to tear out a per pixel transparency). A plugin like SuperPNG (old version) or PS 5 PNG will allow you to save with the much more user friendly non destructive alpha channel.

@James

I dont know if you saw this, but Pat Wilson added supported to Torque3D to let the specular run as its own bitmap! This way you can have full color RGB specular that affects the tint of your bitmaps versus a flat 8 bit b&w image.

#6 superpng for win and mac