Tarmac Lights

[Raul]

Hi,
I'm designing an airport and I want to put some lights at the parking gates. This is what I have done so far:
1-I create a surface in Sketchup v.15 and have applied a texture to it, with a 20% transparency. The texture was made in Photoshop CS6 including a black alpha channel.

2-I use MCX to apply difusse and night textures and convert it to dds.

3-In Library Creator I compiled to bgl.

4-From ADE 1.55 I use Library Object to place the surface in FSX world.

5-I run FSX and in night time things are acceptable but at daytime I still see where the object is placed. If I make it completely transparent I will not see anything at night.

Question: How to make the diffuse texture not visible during daytime and still showing the light at nighttime?

I will appreciate any help.

my System:: Intel Core I7 4GHz, Ram 16GB, 64 bit OS, Win 10, 2x Nvidia GTX970

 

[tgibson]

Use a black alpha channel in your day texture to make it completely transparent?

 

[Raul]

Use a black alpha channel in your day texture to make it completely transparent?

Hi Tom,
When I use a black alpha Channel in my day texture, it also makes transparent the night texture. I think I'm missing something. What about changing options in Model Converter X to correct this behavior? Have you an idea?

 

[pinkjr]

If this is FSX, sorry no workaround. The alpha from the day texture IS the alpha of the night texture. You can fool it a bot by using a diffuse daylight texture that blends well with your ground polygon. With practice, you can almost blend it perfectly to where it appears transparent during daylight.

 

[Anthony31]

Here is one technique that I have used:

Emissive Mode: AdditiveNightOnly
FramebufferBlend mode
DestinationBlend:One
SourceBlend:One

The day texture is then black with an alpha channel for the light splash
The night texture has light splash on both the colour (or normal or base channel or whatever it is called) and alpha channels

By setting the framebufferblend to One:One FSX should ignore the alpha channels (I can't remember why my textures have alpha channels but they do, I made this scenery a few years ago. In theory they should work without alpha channels) and instead the colour channel is used to blend based on the colour. Black in the colour channel effectively becomes transparent so the day texture is black. As the night texture has colour and only comes on at night (additivenightonly) it is the only thing that will be seen and only at night.

See my Hamilton scenery for an example of this http://www.antsairplanes.com/scenery.html
Texture file is YHML_Apronlight.dds and YHML_Apronlight_LM.dds

EDIT: This is a variation on the lotus sim style landing lights. I prefer to use this for scenery as the lotus sim style landing lights suffer terribly when there is any reduced visibility conditions which in scenery can be quite often.

 

[Anthony31]

Here's a pic of Hamilton Aero in Victoria YHML:

 

[Raul]

Thank you all. I just change Emissive mode to Blend and everything works fine. I appreciate your help. [SOLVED]

 

[pinkjr]

This is my "blended diffusive" method. Cool to say all the ways you can skin a cat!