dark alpha textures

(captain_cadaver) #1

just a quick question. i was looking at the tga files for the alpha textures in the pak0.pk3 for enemy territory, and something i found a bit strange is that in each file i looked at, the actual image portion of the texture was black… is there a reason for this? just seems strange to me. i realize that the alpha channel needs to be white on black, but i guess i don’t understand why the main image portion (fence_m06.tga for instance) is black until i crank up the contrast.

and before i forget this question later, is it possible with shaders to make an alpha texture volumetric? what i mean is, could the alpha texture repeat on the insides of the brush as well? i ask because i had thought to include an area in my map with clouds of mosquitoes (lil black dots, haha), but it would seem that using alpha textures would just make surfaces of a brush have the little nasties on them, instead of giving the true effect of a cloud or swarm of them.

([rD]MrPink) #2

Well, for the black alpha, I’m guessing your editor/default in GTK is to show alpha as black. I know many good programs like photoshop and paintshop pro have the option to make alpha show as any color you want.

My suggestion for the mosquitos is make the texture into a skybrush in your shader file, that is to say, make it into sky and tell it to sway back and forth like a sky. You should also be able to walk right through the brush then.

(damocles) #3

If you look at the textures in an image program then they do appear very dark, some of them even appear almost black.

This is simply to do with the way the textures are brightened in the game. You can alter the gamma correction amount in Radiant to show them up brighter if it helps.

As for mossies, I’d suggest using the shader params:

surfaceparm noclip
surfaceparm trans
cull disable

That will make the images draw on both sides of the polygons and not be solid. For added effect, make several brushes iwht the texture on them at right angles to each other (making a kind of lattice) and make each brush rotate at a different speed, this will give a kind of swirling mossie cloud effect.

(captain_cadaver) #4

i was talking about the files looking dark in photoshop, actually, not radiant (though they look black in radiant also). i was mostly just curious if that was an essential part of alpha textures as i’ve created a lattice (which i may put some ivy onto) that i want to make into an alpha texture, but it’s an off white color.

thanks for the tips on the mosquitoes damocles, i’ll definitely give that a try once i get down to the detail phases on my map, still just putting in the main structures and worrying about layout before i go into that.