Conversion Help again

H

Hern07

Charter Member
First, thanks to all who came to my aid last time. This time I'm converting a Fs2004 Martin B-10 to CFS2 and am working on extra textures. Some of the textures are transparent. I remember a thread like this on the old servers, but it's gone now. I seemed to remember that MW's dxtbmpx was involved so I downloaded it, but I can't figure out how to make it work. Would appreciate any help. :kilroy:
 
Are the textures transparent and you want them not to be...Or are they non-transparent and you want them to be?

OBIO
 
Obio to the rescue again, thanks. I have 8 different textures for a Martin B-10. Some are blue and yellow and others O.D. and yellow, and, although I haven't checked all of them, these seem to work fine. One or two are Gray (silver?) and these are semi-transparent, ie the wheels are visible even though they are retracted. I want the semi-transparent tp be opaque. I'm a little bit older than most of y'all and sometimes I end up fighting my computer. It don't come naturally. So, if you can help, it would be nice if you could phrase it like "see Dick run, run Dick run." (LOL.)
 
Okay...this is an easy one. Open the file that needs fixed into DXTbmp. There are two "windows"...the one of the left is the texture and the one on the right (smaller one) is the alpha channel..which is what produces transparency in CFS2. Go along the menu bar at the top, where it says File, Prefs, Image, Alpha)....select Alpha. Scroll down to the middle section and click Create Alpha Channel (Green). This command will tell DXTbmp to search the main texture image (left window) for any true green (which is very very rarely used in paint schemes) and to create an alpha channel for that area. Since there will be no true green, DXTbmp will produce a new alpha channel that is blank...there by no transparency.

There can be a snag to this from time to time. If part of the original alpha channel works to make the canopy glass transparent and you remove the alpha channel, the canopy glass will be solid and not see through. If this happens on your B-10, let me know and I will give you step by step instructions on how to get the glass to be transparent again.

The reason the Gray ones are semi-transparent is that they are intended to depict bare metal. In FS2004, the alpha channel is used to produce shine....the gray texture with the alpha channel, in FS2004, looks like polished shiny aluminum. When those type of textures are brought into CFS2, the alpha channel causes the texture to be semi-transparent. CFS2, as I stated above, uses the alpha channel for transparency and shine is determined by settings within the MDL file....which is the exact opposite of how it is done in FS2004.

OBIO
 
Seems easy enough, I'll let you know how it works. :jump: ....Sometime later, worked fine, thank you for the help.
 
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