thanx but we have a slight misunderstanding, I thought you had got the _decal entity to work with the func_rotating.
I already can do animated “decals” but their not the same as the _decal ent which as Ive recently learnt, projects its shader onto a mesh that is kinda shrunk wrapped, onto the underlying brushes or patches.
now if we could animate those, it would allow for some very cool effects.
The fan shadow shader that ships with Quake 3 is an example of a manual decal that will work with a _decal entity. It uses tcMod rotate to animate the shadow.
It’s just a shader effect.
I’m trying to make a map with a fan shadow, but for JA not Q3… anyways I read over this several times, but I’m confused.
Lil Killa showed that decal that comes with JA, I tryed it (even though it is a sign, not a shadow) and I got a spinning sign on the floor. (ya its func_rotating)
so what i have is four patch meshes for the fan blades, and one cilinder cap for the center, siting on my floor, under the fan, textured in decals/sign_decal3
if you want to make a decal tex, the exact same shape as your brush and patch work, then one method is to take a screen capture of radiant`s xy window, using a paint program like photoshop or psp, the latter being what I use.
then simply paint over the outlines you have of your fan in the screen capture …crop it, and maybe resize to say 128x128 or larger, and save as a .jpg if your using blendfunc add in your shaders, or a 32 bit .tga if your using blendfunc blend, the latter produces a more subtle effect, but it depends on the lighting your using which looks better in your map.
making the alpha channel is a little more complicated but there are probably some good tutorials the other guys in here can give you links for, if you need help with those… if you cant find any links I can give you step by step instructions but only really for psp, as Im sure the commands are named differently in other programs, although the principles should be the same.
also the simplist and most engine friendly way of animating the shadow is to use a shader something similar to the one lil killer posted above.
