making correct textures for picoterrain

(Davros) #1

hi, ive been using ydnar’s textures as place holders, but now its time to convert my jpegs to picoterrain textures.

i usually use paintshop pro to make tga’s by selecting the main part of the texture and then selection > save to alpha channel. however i seem to be doing something wrong as there is no smooth transition with my textures, just straight from grass to rock, for example.

could someone give me some tips on how to do this properly using paintshop pro. i do have photoshop on cdr too, so if someone could explain using that id be just as grateful

thanks

:drink:

(Fracman) #2

First thing… if you use directly the texture or parts of it as selection for alpha channel, you mostly won’t have smooth shades.
I recommend copying the texture, converting it to gray scale first, then you can e.g. smoothen it or change brightness, contrast or gamma accordingly to the effect you want.
Then select the original texture, go to the menu “mask”, then select new -> from image -> select the gray copy. The transparent parts should become some checker background (depends on your own PSP preferences).
Then go to the menu “selection”, there use “selection from mask”.
Now save this selection to alpha channel, delete the mask without merging it, and finally save the texture as TGA, 24 bits, compressed or not. Don’t save PNG with PSP 7 since there PNG can’t have alpha unfortunately. Perhaps in PSP 8, but i don’t have that. If you absolutely want PNG, use a different tool to convert the TGA.

Second thing, the blending depends also on your shader and on the model / terrain you’re using it on.
You should try different settings in a smaller test map anyway…

(ydnar) #3

PicoTerrain must be a pair of TGA images, not PNG or JPEG. The image loader it uses only understands TGA. :slight_smile:

There’s a sample PicoTerrain map here:

http://www.shaderlab.com/pmterrain/picoterrain.zip

It uses shaders from this map here:

http://www.shaderlab.com/pmterrain/shaderlab_terrain.zip

Hope that helps.

(Davros) #4

thanks fracman and ydnar, just compiling now! :smiley:

edit

seems to work :clap: however my second texture that shows on steeper parts seems to always show the grass. think ill have to play around with the amount transparency. thanks again!

(Fracman) #5

Apropos… any idea how to make GTKRadiant 1.4 show the picoterrain!? dumb question… but i dont know, really :banghead: