transparency in gmax - part 2 - worth a read ;)

[Guest christian]

A couple of days ago I posted a rant here that the transparency in FS2002 is useless for buildings. I poked around a bit more and I'm now coming to the conclusion that there is a serious bug in the FS2002 engine...Pic 1 shows what I get. As I said previously, this is unreal. Only the glass surfaces facing the sun should have the highlight blended over them, not the whole building! The building looks like it is made out of chrome, rather than having just ONE highlighted side. Pic 2 shows a quick attempt to reproduce what I WANT to have. The side in the shadow is a bit dark, basically I want the original texture without any highlights on the side facing away from the sun.If anyone can produce the effect in pic 2, I would be grateful if they would tell me how!Now, an experiment I did (pic 3). I changed the specular colour in the material to red, and bingo, the side facing the sun indeed reflects a red light source!!! (I also set the specular power to 1). This would be great, but unfortunately the effect has gone beserk! Instead of using the alpha channel like the reflectivity in pic 1 is using it, it uses it the other way round!!! Now, areas which shouldn't be reflective at all reflect the red light 100% (see top of building)!I think this is a bug. When thinking about it, alpha = 255 should be reflect light source, but indeed it's the other way round, which seems counterintuitive (I'm talking about the reflectivity in pic 1).Now, in pic 3 however, it is indeed the intuitive way, alpha 255 reflects the light source strongest. What you can see is that in pic 3 only the side facing the sun is reflecting red light, not the sides in the shadow. Somewhere something must have gone wrong. Maybe M$ has programmed correct reflectivity shown in pic 3. However, I suspect that the makemdl had a bug and didn't export the specular colour values in the material. This may have triggered that M$ then once again added reflecivity, but wrongly (the effect in pic 1, and the effect we all were taught to use). This is all just speculation, but the fact is that the pic 1 reflectivity ruins the pic 3 reflectivity, because we can't disable the standard reflectivity (ie pic 3 minus pic 1 is pic 2, the reflectivity we want, just pic 2 would be lit by a red light source). I had the idea if I would maybe play with the other values in the material (eg set diffuse colour to black), I'd get the effect I want, but unfortunately that won't work. Just taking the reflective texture out won't work either because then the building becomes transparent. At the moment it seems we are stuck with that bug...Maybe someone else has an idea how to reproduce pic 2, which is the reflectivity how it should have been done in the first place...Cheers, Christian

[Guest christian]

Ok, I messed it up. You have to swap pic 2 and pic 3 otherwise you want understand the above!!!Christian

[Guest odog]

hi Christian,Well you must be a whole lot smarter than I am, because your post really confused the heck out of me. I try and keep things simple for my simple mind, and let gmax do the work for me. when I create a texture I apply in gmax as usual, then i set the highlight to 999 and 5. this gives any texture good reflectivity. I did this to a stock water texture and at dawn when the skies are red the water reflects that color, even with water slider set to detail only, and looks 100% better than stock with slider maxed. this will also only reflect the sunny side. I hope I helped, but i dont use alphas when I texture in gmax.Odog

[Guest christian]

Hey, I can't be that much smarter, at least you worked it out :-lolok, I actually didn't mess around with gmax, but edited the bglc files, but you are right, once you drop the alpha channel you get the highlight effect I want. I will try your gmax method next.I remember I tried this before any SDK was out and it didn't work for me. One thing though, do you get that shiny look with your method? The highlights get blended over the texture on the sunny side now, but the texture doesn't look shiny... If you have a close look at my screenshots above you may see what I mean with 'shiny'.About the alpha channel, that's how M$ wrote in the SDK how to do these shiny (reflective) textures. A pity it doesn't work the same like when you use a material. Read the MakeMDL SDK docs, you'll probably understand my first post then.Anyway, I like your method better, because it works together with the sun, although I can't reproduce the 'shinyness' (yet).Thanks, Christian

[Guest odog]

heres a shot of my water effect...this is the most i can get out of a reg texture...are you looking for, like a wet, glossy look? cuz my card is a pos and i dont know if it works for me or not...

[Guest christian]

Unfortunately, your solution isn't sufficient for my purposes. I will need the alpha channel, because I'm planning to do this reflection effect also on brick buildings (only windows will reflect). So, I will weed the alpha channel to mask the windows out. Very annoying it doesn't work as it should.Christian