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Author Topic: Quickly putting transparency in your textures  (Read 1279 times)

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Quickly putting transparency in your textures
« on: 05 Sep 2008, 18:12:07 »
Hello all!
During my texturing session, I've discovered a quick and very easy way to put transparency in textures (without expecting it and being happy for it because I've looked for it for a long time - in order to put a logo on my soldier's right arm - and I hadn't any tool able to do it... So try to guess how I felt!!!).
Anyway, even if most of you already know this trick or how to make a transparent texture, I would like to reveal it to the others who don't. You just need MS Paint (don't laugh please...  :D), a simple TGA converter (I used Convim) and, of course, TexView.
Well, here it is: have your nice texture opened on MS Paint and colour the zone you want to be transparent with black (the first upper left coloured box at the bottom of the MS Paint's window ;)). If you have some black part of the textures that you want to view in game, to avoid the transparency affects them, you need to recolour them with a more light black (you can select it from the "Custom colour" window --- double click on white colour to open it).
Save it as a Bitmap 24 bit file and then convert it with a TGA converter.
About TGA conversion: I didn't selected any options in the converter window and all the boxes were unchecked and I hadn't any special option put in that I could have missed to uncheck; assuming the TGA converter is Convim (the one I used), I've just selected my bmp texture - through a drop-down menu - choosed the output format as a Targa 32 bit and saved the converted texture.
Once you had the 32 bit TGA'ed texture with the blacken transparency, you can open it through TexView and save it as a paa file because, as I read from some OFPEC posts, it is the one that likes transparency.
One more thing: at the moment I tested this trick only to human units because I needed it there and I don't know about models; you could test it on some other kind of models and report what you got here.
Hope it helps.
« Last Edit: 05 Sep 2008, 18:23:11 by bedges »
? (this == thinkable) : this = scriptable

Offline bedges

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Re: Quickly putting transparency in your textures
« Reply #1 on: 05 Sep 2008, 18:23:49 »
Excellent tips, thanks for letting us know, but please don't use all-caps when posting - we can see the text just fine.  :good: