Aces High Bulletin Board

General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: gatso on November 04, 2002, 12:59:50 PM

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: gatso on November 04, 2002, 12:59:50 PM

Had some time to kill today, remembered someone having mentioned wanting air racing schemes for late war aircraft so I started on a spit14.

Port side fuselage has something I can't work around without changing the scheme I want.

(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stant.family/Aceshigh/ahss382.gif)

This is the problem. That little marking is a different scale and does not exactly line up pixel-pixel with the work around it.

So. I know how the principle behind using alpha layers to make certain bits of a texture transparent so I thought maybe I could just mask off the bit I didn't want (the blue marking) and hey presto all would be good.

All I've managed to achieve is make the entire texture completely transparent when in game. So Q's. Can any texture have a  _a.bmp texture assigned to it? What am I doing wrong if so?

TYIA

Gatso

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: Dux on November 04, 2002, 04:28:46 PM

Hi Gatso,
try saving the _a.bmp as an 8-bit greyscale, and not 8-bit color... this has worked for me.

However, I think your reasoning may be flawed... By Alpha-ing that section, you may get just a "hole", and not a complete skin underneath. You may have to actually paint that little patch to fit into the space it occupies to get it to look right.

Good luck either way. :)

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: gatso on November 04, 2002, 05:08:25 PM

Thanks Dux. 8bit greyscale did the trick  :)

Looking carefully at how the artwork is applied in AH I was almost certain that it just overlays a small area on top of the original texture.  Guess what... I was right.  :)

Work now in progress again...



Gatso

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: WldThing on November 04, 2002, 06:33:11 PM

Gatso now did u just paint those flames or did you cut and paste from a diff pic?

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: gatso on November 04, 2002, 07:35:37 PM

They are 'borrowed ish' ;)

Initially I tried painting them myself. Quickly came to the conclusion that I suck at painting flames and cheated by basing them on the car skin Frenchy posted in 'that' thread in the screenshots forum.

They're not lifted 1:1 exactly, I just used them as baseline for the black outlines, but it did give me an idea what I should be doing. So I guess the answer is yes and no. Wings are next and they're going to be a little more complicated.

Gatso

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: WldThing on November 04, 2002, 09:56:32 PM

rgr thanks

Title: Alpha masks for textures
Post by: Dux on November 05, 2002, 02:17:39 PM

Anytime, Gatso!