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Making aprons dirty

Gianni

Gianni

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453
Country
austria
Hi, I havn't found any hint yet (perhaps I'm serching for the wrong items). So perhaps somebody has an idea:

What I want to achieve is that the ground polys (fs2002 gamepack) which show the apron material (concrete and asphalt) are showing traces of heavy use. I mean that rubber abrasion and patches of oil and grease shall be visible.

To do that I painted the traces in photoshop 7.0. I then added an alpha channel and mounted the pictures (512x512 pxl) onto additional polys which lay OVER the apron polys. They show up but the transparency isn't there. I was not able to totally remove the background colour on the photo because the wizzard is interpreting parts of the picture (which are very lightly grey) being a colour.

Does anybody know a workaround?

Greetings vorm Vienna/Austria
Gianni
 
Hi Gianni,

How did you make the alpha channel? If you define it correct you should be able to get this working.

If you make your textures in PhotoShop it is probably easiest to make the alpha channel there as well and then save as a PSD file. ImageTool can read them and you alpha channel is there in the DXT file right away :).
 
@arno

Thanks for reply. I tried it once again and this time it worked. I applied the "dirt" on a transparent background this time, and aside from them problem that the different grey scales in the Bitmap mode are transferred to something looking quite weird (see the thread from Horst concerning the smoothness of the alphachannel), I succeeded. But I did not apply an alpha channel in Photoshop. However, after compiling the picture by imagetool into a DTX format (with mipmaps) the "dirt" shows up in fs9.

Another question: Is it always necessary to apply an alpha channel? What are the advantages to create one? As you see, it works without.

Greetings from Vienna/Austria
Gianni
 
Well if your dirt-texture has transparency then it'd have an alphachannel. As far as I know you need an alphachannel to blend textures.
On the other hand: FS can blend fx-textures by multiplying them - why can't it do that with scenery-textures?
 
@Thorsten

Hi,

this turns out to develop to a private discussion ;) doesn'it?

I see your point. But I am wondering whether the additionally made alpha-channel has an influency to the kind of appearance of the texture in fs9. It seems to me that transparent ground textures WITHOUT an alpha-channel blend in later and badly influences the framerate than those WITH this kind of channel. What I simply do not know is whether this effect is caused by the certain layer structure of my project or by the clouds I use or by whatever. :scratchch

I'll try it this evening. Thanks again.

Gianni
 
Hi Gianni,

If you textures blends or is partly transparant then it must have an alpha channel. Maybe some tool added it for you, while you are not aware of it, but it must be there.

In general I prefer to add it myself, as you have a good control over it in that case. Which tool are you using to make your DXT textures?
 
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