Alpha shader

[Delmi]

Hey guys,

 

Can someone jog my memory as to how to do alpha channeling to make certain parts of a skin invisible without using the *off function?  Using Photoshop CS6 and I've gone through a few tutorials via Google (aka I'm not interested in some lulzy reply with a lmgtfy link) and I still can't get the parts to go away in ModView or ingame.  Any suggestions?

[mrwonko]

The only reasonable way to do transparency is with (effectively) a 1 bit alpha channel, i.e. either on or off. To this end you'd use an alphaFunc in your shader to define the cutoff point (e.g. GT0 to make alpha 1-255 visible, LT128 for 0-127, GE128 for 128-255 or GE192 for 192-255). You'd still use an ordinary blendFunc as with normal solid shaders, I believe, since the alphaFunc takes care of transparency, so I don't think an explicit depthWrite is required.

 

This will only be visible ingame; ModView completely ignores shaders, but you can enable alpha blending in the menu (which is more akin to blendFunc GL_SRC_ALPHA GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA, with the same problems: there's no depth sorting, so you get visual glitches.)

[AshuraDX]

ModView completely ignores shaders

that's wrong ,it reads shaders, atleast the version I have does - but it does not display the end result of the shader

[Delmi]

ModView has always shown alpha shaders for me.

 

But my confusion isn't about the shaders anyways, it's about the process with the texture itself. 

[mrwonko]

Have an alpha channel, save as png or tga. Not sure where the problem is? Sorry, but this does sound like an excellent thing to google for. "How do I add an alpha channel in photoshop?" or whatever.

[Delmi]

Yeah, I've tried alpha channel bit.  But as I remember, there was more to it than just creating a alpha channel and saving it.

 

 

I've gone through a few tutorials via Google

 

[mrwonko]

Feel free to upload a tga/png for us to take a look at.

[Tempust85]

I don't think modview actually reads shaders, it likely just detects an alpha channel in a TGA or transparency in a PNG.

 

I always save my TGA's as 32-bit, RGB color & 8-bit channel.

 

 

*REMOVED SNIPPET DUE TO DAT SILLY DT.

[mrwonko]

No, that is a customizable color shader, DT85. In this case the alpha channel is used to mark the parts that change color, but the resulting shader is non-transparent.