Transparent Texture??

[nudata 10]

Just a thought - If I produce a terrascene bmp with a solid background of a specific color and with roads their normal colors, can the solid color somehow be declared transparent to allow the underlying FS2002 textures to show through??Dick

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Dick.No. Resample produced CUSTOM BGLs always shows transparent as water.If you display the slices as VTP polygons, you can use the transparency, as has been discussed quite a bit before. But there are problems. VTP polys need to have the textures vertically flipped, and the texture format will need to be 8-bit mipped with alpha, just like the road and shoreline textures. Also, the last VTP poly layer will control which autogen shows. If you place the transparency over the default scenery, it will exclude the default autogen.Better to use the Terrascene mask as a background image for VTP lines or polys, with a program like Ground2K. It will handle an LOD8 sized background well. In fact, if you don't like the tapering of the VTP road lines, and don't want to fool with the Source code to correct that, you can make roads as narrow VTPm2 polys, with a concrete texture. It works pretty well.Chris Wright is going to have another version of AutoASM coming along. I'm hoping this newer version will have VTP poly support. It may be able to handle Terrascene road masks, as polys of this type. Polys or lines exclude autogen only under the poly or line. I've used Chris' program to make very detailed, LOD8 sized LWM polys from Terrascene water masks. The principle should be the same for VTP polys. If it will work, then it would be pretty automatic.If you have a narrow VTP poly as a road, it will just exclude the autogen under the road itself.Nobody needs to shy away from Ground2K, or Coastline-Maker or LWMDraw because of a lack of drawing skills. Generally, you don't need an exceptionally detailed "brush". In most cases, "close enough" is close enough. I like Ground2K's drawing interface. The lines are drawn as lines strung between points. Very easy to use, and actually makes quite compact ASM code.With VTP polys, we have 64 Layers to work with, and we can use custom texture sets. There's very little that can't be done with VTP, as far as ground texturing is concerned.Dick