Making Transparent Textures Quick tut by Simsample
[quote=simsample]The textures should be DDS (DXT5) for terrain paints; this supports alpha channels which will give you transparency. PNG formats do work but are lossless compressed, so are larger file size which will reduce game performance.
To save as a DDS you need the NVidia DDS utilities, and a DDS plugin for your photoediting program.
DDS Utilities here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/content/dds-utilities-83111271645
Photoshop plugin here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
GIMP (free program) plugin here:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/
You need to make your texture and then add an alpha channel. Make the parts of the alpha channel you want transparent white, and the parts you want opaque black. So for the EA pebble texture, which looks like this:
I made an alpha channel which looks like this:
When it's in-game, there will be gaps between the pebbles so that other textures can show through. The red bits will be transparent:
If you look at the EA grass_flowersYellow.dds in the source textures folder you will see that they have made the grass area transparent on that image, so that only the flowers show. You could use a similar method to make your cherry petals, or possibly just recolour that one.[/quote]
[quote=simsample]The textures should be DDS (DXT5) for terrain paints; this supports alpha channels which will give you transparency. PNG formats do work but are lossless compressed, so are larger file size which will reduce game performance.
To save as a DDS you need the NVidia DDS utilities, and a DDS plugin for your photoediting program.
DDS Utilities here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/content/dds-utilities-83111271645
Photoshop plugin here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
GIMP (free program) plugin here:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/
You need to make your texture and then add an alpha channel. Make the parts of the alpha channel you want transparent white, and the parts you want opaque black. So for the EA pebble texture, which looks like this:
I made an alpha channel which looks like this:
When it's in-game, there will be gaps between the pebbles so that other textures can show through. The red bits will be transparent:
If you look at the EA grass_flowersYellow.dds in the source textures folder you will see that they have made the grass area transparent on that image, so that only the flowers show. You could use a similar method to make your cherry petals, or possibly just recolour that one.[/quote]
