Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: TrashMan on August 27, 2007, 11:03:57 am
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Why aren't there good instruction for them in the Wiki??? :nervous:
I damn forgot how to make .dds nameplates...Oh, .pcx ones are easy, but I want the partial transparency you can get with .dds....it jsut looks way better.
I made them before for chapter 1 of FOW, but now I cna't friggin recall the exact procedure!
Do I save as DTX1? No alpha? 1 bit alpha? DTX3? DTX5?
Black background or transparent one? AAAAGH! :hopping:
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I have never done one before but my guess would be dxt5 with transparent background.
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heres how it works, you need a flat polygon on the ships surface. it needs to very slightly raised above the surface of the hull so the renderer doesnt screw up. it also has to be part of the ships main geometry, not a subobject (subobject alpha doesnt work anyway). its gonna be rectangular so just give those polys a nice square uv map. set it's texture to invisible in your model.then you can change the nameplate texture through texture replacement in fred. for textures use dxt5 (dxt1 is for 24 bit, dxt1a has 1 bit alpha which might work better for this purpose, dont use dxt3 its more lossy and has no advantage over dxt5).
thats how it should and could be done, that is not how v did it. the way they did it requires that the plate blend in with its adjacent textures.
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Oh, I know about hte surface on the ship bit and everything..I made those, alltough with .pcx nameplates
All the .dds nameplates I tried to make now ended up non-transparent. White latters, black background. The ones I made before worked fine. I'm getting old and senile dammit! :hopping:
This is the process I use:
512x128 image, RGB, full black background. New layer - white letters (stop font), 80% transparency - save as .dds .. tried to save as DTX1, DTX3 and DTX5, and in all cases the balack wasn't transparent..I'm going crazy.. :wtf:
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It's doing exactly what you're telling it to do. Black background doesn't mean transparent background, and a layer with 80% transparency doesn't mean much since stuff like TGA and DDS don't use layers. You have to create an alpha channel and use that to decide how everything will show up. In the alpha channel, completely black means completely transparent and white means completely opaque and shades of gray are in between.
Now DXT1 only has 1 bit Alpha and can look pretty ugly, and I've always been told to stay away from DXT3, so I would recommend DXT5 for any texture with a transparency.
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Ok, I got it...bettter write the procedure down in the wiki ;)
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Now DXT1 only has 1 bit Alpha and can look pretty ugly, and I've always been told to stay away from DXT3, so I would recommend DXT5 for any texture with a transparency.
dxt1 and dxt1a are different formats, dxt1a has 1 bit trans, the other does not. the 1 bit trans might be adequit for a nameplate and should come out clean under trilinear.