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alpha (again and again...)

D

dbur

Messages
32
Country
france
Hi all,
I'm back to scenery design that I left several years ago with FS2K2.
I'm designing my local airfield for FSX, everything goes well until I designed the TV antenna for the area with SketchUp, exported it to Collada (.dae) with SketchUp 7 and 8, and loaded it into ModelConverterX. It seemed OK (transparency OK, etc). Mass texture editor also OK, alpha mask OK, but once in FSX, no transparency at all (solid black or white areas where transparency is supposed to be). i've checked everything numerous times, tried EACH and EVERY format available (DXT1,3,5,TGA with alpha, extendedBMP, DDS...), tweaked the various textures with ImageTool, MCX, and DXTBMP, no luck !
i've even tried replacing my texture with a stock FSX one that has transparency, the transparent areas appear solid black. :confused:
Any clue someone ? I'm really puzzled...
 
You have set the % opacity in the painting tool of sketchup, sorry but I must to ask this, :confused:, the odd thing is that as you say in modelconvertex is all okay, sorry but I can be of much more help here I'm a newbie here too.
 
Hi,

I would check if the material has the right properties. In FSX alpha channels are not displayed automatically, the material must have the right settings.

ModelConverterX should do this automatically for you, but you can also use the "Set Default Transparent" button on the material that has the alpha channel to be sure the setting is right.
 
Hi Bernardo,
I'm using either a PSD texture or a PNG texture inside SketchUp so I have the alpha support OK for my material.
Do I need to set some or full transparency to the Sketchup material ?
Here are some snapshots of what's happening in Sketchup, ModelConverterX and ImageTool (same goes for DTXBMP).
Thanks for your time
 

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Hi Arno,
I think you are the man !
Below is the exported DAE file from SketchUp.
I think there's something wrong somewhere with these lines :
<transparent>
<color>1 1 1 1</color>
</transparent>

I've tried changing to <color>0 0 0 1</color> but no luck either ...

Thanks for listening ;)
 

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Hey,
What's the magic behind the "set default transparent" button ??? It works now !

Thanks a million Arno,
 

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dbur said:
What's the magic behind the "set default transparent" button ??? It works now !
Click to expand...

It sets the right material properties, so that the alpha channel is used by FSX as well.

But could you send me your DAE file and textures? Because the DAE importer should automatically set these properties when it detects an texture with alpha channel. And it seems that did not happen in your case.
 
Hi,

I just check the ModelConverterX code and I was wrong. I did not set the material settings automatically for textures with an alpha channel (some of the readers for other formats do so).

So I have now updated the COLLADA reader and from tomorrow the development release should automatically set the right properties.
 
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