[TrashMan]

Teh naemplates on my ships are invisible planes flaoting a few mm above the hull.

And I think I figured it out in photoshop.

You make a transparent Layer.
Add a new layer.
Write the text on it.
Reduce the transpareny of that layer to 90%
merge layers
Save as DDS or tga.

Just one thing, I used the auto-generate mip maps option when making the DDS. (DTX5 setting).
Someone said you should use only 4 mip map levels. (note -my nameplates are 256x256)

[Shadow0000]

Thanks. I was wondering if I did something wrong, the problem is that I using PhotoPaint (Corel), so maybe it didn't work because it was old, but I'll see, if not, then I'll use GIMP.

[StratComm]

I was afraid that you were going to make square nameplates.  There's really no reason for them to be that way; you can make them 512x64, for example, and have the same filesize but occupy much more of the available space with text.  But otherwise, that's exactly right.

[Shadow0000]

Could someone explain me how to do the NamePlates which uses Alpha (Leviathan/Fenris/Deimos/Hecate) using PhotoShop, I can't really figure out how to do it.

[Goober5000]

http://www.sectorgame.com/goober/nameplates.html

[Petrarch of the VBB]

If you're applying a nameplate to a ship, do you have to do it in a text editor?

If I try to do it through the texture replacement thing in FRED, it goes all illegal-op when I save the mission.

[Goober5000]

That's a bug in FRED.  Text editing should work.

[Shadow0000]

I am not talking about the Orion and Faustus nameplates which are made through Blur multiple Layers, that's tuturial is excellent but it doesn't really help me.

What I mean are the Leviathan nameplates, also used for Fenris/Deimos/Hecate models. The RGB layer uses white letters with a Black Background, while the Alpha Layer uses a Black background also (means 100% transparent), bu the the letters have a 10% transparency. That's what I don't know how to do, I understand it, but I can't really do it.

RGB Channel:



Alpha Channel:



The only way that I can think of doing this, is to save the the same image as a Bitmap but with the Letters at 10% Oppacity, then I use the option to load an Alpha Channel from a Bitmap. That way seems to work, but it is wrong there should be a simple way to do it.

[Goober5000]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you might be able to get away with using the tutorial but just deleting the Orion nameplate layer.  Then you end up with a transparent nameplate with no background, which you can then use in the model.

[Admiral Nelson]

I did these in GIMP, in which you just can just set the transparency of the text layer to 90% and voila.  I have only photoshop elements, so I'm not sure exactly how it can be done in photoshop itself, but I would think you can just put the text on its own layer and then adjust the opacity of that layer.

[Mehrpack]

hi,
normaly in the newer versions you can edit the opacity of the textlayer, but i doesnt know if it with older version possible, too.

but i not, make a new empty layer and merge down the text layer to the empty layer, now its the text a normal layer and the opacity can edit.

Mehrpack

[Porthos]

Hey could you fix the links for these? that would be sweet.