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Transparent decals with Blender

Q

qqwertz

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42
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ca-novascotia
Hi All,

I am running out of ideas how to achieve the green/blue painting on the wall of this building:
CYTH terminal
I have the siding in place and want to create those rectangular patches of paint on it. My idea (in Blender) was to add a plane in the respective color and make it transparent. That works fine in Blender, but I couldn't get it to work in MSFS:
- if I use MSFS Standard as material, the plane remains opaque, even if I add opacity/Material Opacity/Opacity as custom property
- If I use MSFS Glass or Decal as material, the plane remains completely transparent.
- I created glass window panes before, but I had to create them as a cube, rather than as a plane, for it to show up. For some reason, that trick doesn't work here either.

Any suggestions on how to get the paint on the wall would be most welcome.

Thanks,
Peter
 
I finally found a way by creating a png texture file. It appears one cannot transfer plane colours from Blender to MSFS, creating texture files is mandatory :confused:
 
I create textures in Blender without images all the time, and they export just fine to MSFS. The key is that you still need to set up a standard MSFS material. Otherwise it won’t export.

Edit: Reading back over your earlier post, I realize you already tried MSFS Standard. Sorry. Your point is that you needed an image in order to control transparency. Interesting.
 
Last edited:
With apologies for my hasty reply earlier today, I have a suggestion for something else you could try. Since you already have an MSFS Standard material for the siding of the building, make two additional identical copies of that material, one named Siding_blue the other named Siding_green. In the "MSFS Material Params" set the color multiplier named Albedo Color for the the Siding_blue material to an appropriate shade of blue, and set the same setting for the Siding_green material to an appropriate shade of green. Then open your wall object in Edit Mode and change the material to Siding_blue for those polygons that should be painted blue, and change the material to Siding_green for those polygons that should be painted green. If you don't want to subdivide the wall surfaces to create polygons that match where you want to use these colors, you could also create separate planes floating in front of the wall that are textured with the Siding_blue and Siding_green textures, but that might be trickier since you then have to get your UV maps for these planes to align properly with the walls behind them. The first method of using different materials on specific polygons in the existing wall object has the advantage that there is only the one UV mapping and your multiple materials will be perfectly aligned since they are based on exactly the same images and only differ by the Albedo multiplier that tints the material a different color.

I tried this idea out quickly on a simple Cube textured with a corrugated metal material. I created a duplicate material and set the Albedo Color multiplier to bright pink as shown here:

blender_ZtK0o4I4Xp.png


I then applied this new material in Edit Mode to only the top face of the Cube. The result was this:

FlightSimulator_p1haF4FRFV.png


Obviously, the pink tinted the bright cyan-blue in the original texture to make a darker purple-blue. But the areas of bare metal turned a nice bright magenta. You would have to tinker with the settings to get your desired color, but it should work pretty well, as long as the base texture is fairly neutral, which I think yours was.
 
Hi Trfsd,

that's a very good suggestion, thanks a lot. I have now created those colour patches with transparent png's created with Gimp, but I will for sure try your method when I run into this problem next time. It is bound to happen, I am afraid :)

Cheers,
Peter
 
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