A few questions about textures in gmax....

[Guest Olve]

I am making a cylinder-esue object (a tower) and I wonder if there's a way to tell gmax to tile a texture five times around the object if I mark the whole thing for texturing. Or do I have to divide it into five slices and texture each one of them separately?And just a short one about textures and alpha channel; can I add alpha textures in the same file as the normal textures or should these be in a separate file. Would it handle gradients?Sorry, I am very new to gmax so go easy on me. :)

[Guest Firestriker]

Yes, you can easily tile a cylindercial objects textures. This was made using a 12 sided cylinder with 3 height segments. The outside, is 42 ft. tall as my texture is 14 bricks tall which scales out to about 42 in. in height. Using a multi-material with the first sub-material color of black and the second sub-material as my bricks texture, I mapped the texture to the outside polygons using a cylinder UV map that is tiled 12 times on the U coords and 6 times on the V coords. The second segment of the cylinder representing the top faces of the top layer of bricks was scaled inward to about 25% of the base diameter and then again to get the 4 in. thickness of the bricks. These faces were uv mapped using the face selection and then UV Unwrapped to a single brick in the texture image. The remaining height segments were then drawn back down to the base to give it the hollowed out look with the base material of black applied to them and no texture mapping. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/108693.jpgAs far as your question about alpha channels goes, gradients don't work real well...at least for me. Perhaps if you use a 32 bit image it will be ok, but 16 bit extended (DXT) seem to pixelate and are not smooth.Lou

[Guest Olve]

Thanks.But if I understand you right, you had ONLY this texture.I have a bitmap with a lot of other textures for the same object (forgot to mention this essential thing in my first post, doh).

[Guest Firestriker]

When you are tiling, you need to keep the textures as separate images or make the texture so that the part that you are going to tile uses the full width or height of the image depending on which direction you are going with the tiling. You can not tile a protion of the bitmap. Within Max, you can use the croping tools to "cut out" a specific area of a bitmap and declare it as a unique material, but this doesn't seem to translate to FS. FS will always tile a full width or full height and ignore any croping you do. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/108715.jpgIn this image, you can see that I am tiling the texture 5 times horizontally. I can "crop" and use less than the full height, by moving the top two handles down. Or I could move the two right side handles so U=0.5 and then move the top two handles so V=5.0 to tile 5 times vertically. But I can not choose a protion of the texture to tile with. I would only be changing the starting point.The other option is to select the polys you want to texture with the portion of the bitmap and use the Face option in the UVW Mapping. Then you can select a protion of the bitmap to map all of selected polys to. Use the UV Unwrap to fine tune the mapping and remember when you are moving the handles that they are "stacked" one on another, so be sure to get them all. This method requires that the bitmap is a very accurate rendering of how you would want each of the select polys to look. This is how the tread on this tire was done.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/108716.gifLou

[Guest Olve]

Cheers! Great to hear.While I have you here, and without staring a new thread; have anyone got a good idea about alpha textures? I would like to make a grid (like a fence). How do I assign this to an object? What do I call the texture? Simply; what do I do?I also tried self illumination in gmax on a scenery object tonight. The SDK didn't like it, so I probably did something wrong. What I want is a pattern on a wall to light up (during the night) as well as a red light on top of a mast.How do I deal with those textures?Are there any tutorials out there (I've searched, but I can't find any)?

[arno 1]

When you want to have an alpha channel in your texture, the easiest way is to just add it as an alpha channel in the paint program you are using. If you then save it as TGA or PSD file ImageTool will read the alpha channel correctly and put it in your final DXT texture for FS.

[Guest Olve]

Which means that as long as I have an alpha channel in a file, I wont have to worry about any settings in gmax and the transparancy will just appear automatically in FS?

[arno 1]

Yes, usually you put the transparancy in the texture and then you don't have to change anything in GMax.You can also make the material in GMax transparant of course, but that is only useful when you are not using a texture.