Transparent Textures.

[Guest]

Hi Bruno, two ways to make transparent windows that I know of. The way I generally do it is to make a texture for the entire building wall, and use a utility like DXTbmp by Martin Wright to add an alpha channel in shades of grey over the windows..saving the two together as a DXT3.The other way is to make and apply a "mulit-material" to the model, making sure when you model to have a polygon exist everywhere there is a window. Then you assign a material id to the building, like material 1, and material 2 to the windows. Make the material for the building be your texture, most likely, and material for the window can be a semi-transparent grey material...you'll see an opacity slider on the material editor.I suspect most folks use the second approach, although the first would use fewer polygons. Personally I haven't made my windows transparent, I use all photo-textures, and the appearance of the windows in the photo is cool enough for me. Still, I do use the idea of transparency in textures often for stairwells, and stuff like that. I haven't used DXT3 for partial transparency, yet I understand it works.Bob Bernstein

[arno 1]

Just like Bob, I ussually use the alpha channel of the textures. I think that is the most common way of doing it.One note, when you make the outside transparant you must also draw an inside of your terminal. For complex terminal this inside is not always visible (because of drawing order/bleed through problems is can dissapear). In that case it can be very hard to get the order correct with GMax (I once did it for a terminal, but that was handcoded in SCASM all the way :)).Because I don't want to handcode my new terminal as well :D, I am now following the same approach as Bob. Using photo real textures (with a good resolution) and I think that looks just as real as the transparant windows I had before.PS. I am not trying to influence you, if you want to have the transparant windows, just do it :). I just want to indicate some of the things you can run into.Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[link:home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]Arno's FlightSim World for scenery design hints, tips and other tricks...

[Guest]

Hi,First thank you very very very much for the details and explanations, which made me think that I'll better go for the photo real textures. :)As you can see on the picture, the gate looks more like a square than what it is suppose to be. How do you guys make such good gate? Since it's my first project, I only use very basic techniques, mostly: I make a Box, then go to "Edit Mesh" Vertex, and play with them. is that ok? How can I get beautiful gates? :-coolBest Regards,Bruno Francescoli.:-newbie

[arno 1]

I make my gates also with simple boxes etc. I think it is more in the texture to get the look. In the picture below you see a piece of my terminal. The gate is build using a few boxes and a cilinder.http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/images/eham04.jpgArno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[link:home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]Arno's FlightSim World for scenery design hints, tips and other tricks...

[Guest]

That's a really nice gate Amo, thanks a lot for sharing it!Best Regards,Bruno

[Guest]

Hi all,This is my first GMAX creation (Still a work in progress). I would like to add to the main building (the biggest one) transparent windows. How can I do that? Oh, by the way, do you know a good tutorial to design sceneries. I tried to look for some, but all for aircrafts.Best Regards,Bruno Francescoli.