Creating Transparent Textures

[stuart277]

Happy New Year to All

I have a question regarding creating textures with transparent areas.
I noticed that the LST 906 seems to have a 'mesh' runway.
I can create one in GMax but it over 2000 poly's.

Recently, Hiede put me onto Colins Essex carrier and a transparent texture that was used on the walkways.
I assume a single plane shape with the texture applied.

I have tried to recreate this affect but I am missing something.

I have:
made a plane shape in Gmax.
made a 256 x 256 tga with a black background and Haze Gray mesh.
applied the texture to the shape
saved it.
opened in DXTBmp
created alpha channel (black)

The picture shows the transparency



Saved as DDS 565.
(This is where I think I am going wrong)

It just shows up Haze Gray mesh with black in between (no transparency)

Any Idea's.

Cheers
Stuart

 

[Allen]

565 dose not support alpha transparency.

LST-906 did not use mesh. It used some type wood sheeting http://www.navsource.org/archives/10/16/160906.htm

LST-16 was mesh http://www.navsource.org/archives/10/16/160016.htm and a 220ft x 16ft flight deck https://laststandonzombieisland.com/tag/uss-lst-525/

LST-386 can bee seen here with what looks to be the same straight thin deck as LST-16 here https://www.navsource.org/archives/10/16/160386.htm but since the pic is from shore no way to know if it mesh or not. Pic here that says LST-386 launching hoppers. https://mikesresearch.com/2022/05/29/us-liaison-planes-wwii/

More pics of LST-16 or LST-386 https://www.klueser.de/story.php?id=27&language=en

 

[UncleTgt]

Happy New Year to All

I have a question regarding creating textures with transparent areas.
I noticed that the LST 906 seems to have a 'mesh' runway.
I can create one in GMax but it over 2000 poly's.

Recently, Hiede put me onto Colins Essex carrier and a transparent texture that was used on the walkways.
I assume a single plane shape with the texture applied.

I have tried to recreate this affect but I am missing something.

I have:
made a plane shape in Gmax.
made a 256 x 256 tga with a black background and Haze Gray mesh.
applied the texture to the shape
saved it.
opened in DXTBmp
created alpha channel (black)

The picture shows the transparency

View attachment 160077

Saved as DDS 565.
(This is where I think I am going wrong)

It just shows up Haze Gray mesh with black in between (no transparency)

Any Idea's.

Cheers
Stuart

Happy New Year Stuart

Save the bitmap as 555-1 format. The pure black will be fully transparent.

If you need a "graded" transparency, dxt3 works too, supporting several transparency levels.

Hope this answers your question.

 

[Dirtman]

G'Day All & Happy New Year.

Reading this thread has made me recall an old "invisible" air-frame: the MK10 torpedo.
Used as an exploding weapon when fired from the VN PT boat but also an invisible, flyable plane that has been used to take in-air screenshots.

I'm sure many of you remember this from "the early days" of CFS2.
Made by Joe Cool (2004) and included in the VN Driveable PT Boat package as a torpedo.
The MK10 installs into the Aircraft folder.

Out of curiosity, I checked the MK10 "texture" folder .. it was empty.
Took her up for a short "hop" this morning ... the only thing I saw was smoke on engine start!

Just wondering if you guys might be able to use this in some way to aid in what you are trying to accomplish.

 

[wolfi]

- fortunately, CFS2 needs only one single polygon as an object Converted into the MDL/BGL file, then you must name everything else in a correct way, and you can use it as invisible aircraft / ship MDL or infrastructure obj / weapon BGL. Important is that you have a polygon in the file, that polygon can indeed be very small, so you nearly can’t see it. I used a “dummy” bomber to create a bomb carpet with more bombs than visible aircraft. (CFS2 Bombers like the B24 Liberator or B25 Mitchel release only one bomb when used as AI aircraft)

wolfi

 

[wolfi]

-Back to the topic, transparent textures work best for close by objects but if you fly/move away sometimes those objects become invisible or blurry. In fsds2 is the option to make a tiled texture, which means you can use a single small texture sometimes on an object. For example the pictures below: One triangle object made from 3 points and 8 sections first picture the object with a single texture (gunsight.bmp), the second picture the object with a tile texture 2 X tiles and 8 Y tiles, third picture same object with 6 X tiles and 8 Y tiles, I created a second object and after applying the tiled texture I deformed the object (useful for cockpit frames). Now for using transparent textures: if you use tiled textures on an object the transparent part can displayed very sharply.

A last example, an object with two different textures, I flipped the outer frame polygons to the front, applied a normal texture to the front. On the back I applied a tiled texture, at last I flipped the frame polygons again, so you have an object with a normal textured frame with a tiled texture inside.

wolfi

 

[wolfi]

Here is a render of a simple object with two textures applied. I made an alpha texture for the gunsight with a round hole, and tiled the gunsight texture, the frame is a single untiled texture. For a better visibility I placed a green box in the background (rendered in DAZ studio)

wolfi