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Alpha layer problems

E

ecagan

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us-colorado
I'm attempting to finish the US Air Force Academy football stadium and I am having problems figuring out how to create an alpha layer. The last thing I wish to do is overlay the stadium seat textures with the AIR FORCE FALCONS letters written into the stands that can be seen from the air. I have PS Elements 2.0 (not the full PS version) as well as GIMP. From Arno's alpha channel pdf document, it states to use PS but I don't seem to have that option available in Elements so I turned to Gimp. Using Gimp, I created an all black background and another layer I put the letters on. Should the black background be 0% opacity and the other layer 100%? Am I creating the alpha layer correctly? There seems to be a huge lack of good tutorials out there on this subject.
Next, on Arno's tutorial, it states to save the file in PSD format. I can do that but Image Tool cannot read it (do I have an old version? I have .63). If old, can someone please point me in the right direction to get an updated version?
Any help would be appreciated. This is a skill in scenery design I would love to have and it's frustrating not being able to finish.
Thanks in advance!:)
Eric
 
Hi Eric,

ImageTool should be able to read the PSD format, but else you can also try the TGA format. The should also be able to save the alpha channel and ImageTool can read it.

The use of PhotoShop in the tutorial is just an example of course, it should also be possible to make an alpha channel in the Gimp. What you have to do there is right click on the layer and then select the option add alpha channel. Just painting the background is not the same as making an alpha channel. I tried it in Gimp, but I had no luck in editing the alpha channel after that.
 
Image Tool

Thanks for the reply Arno. It appears I have figured out how to create the alpha channel in the layer. I saved it as a .tga and opened Image Tool. In Image Tool, the options are different than what you specify in your pdf doc. In Image Tool, I only have one option under the Image menu. It is called Resample. The options under Resample are Rearest neighbor (box), bilinear (triangle), bicubic (B-spline), Bell, Hermite, Mitchell, Lanczos3.
Are you familiar with what each menu option means? I don't seem to have the same options you speak about for creating Mipmaps. Can I also use DXTBMP for this?
Also, when putting them into FSDSv3, I cannot see anything. How should transparencies look when applying the texture?
Eric
 
Update to alpha channel issue

Just a quick update. I figured out how to add the alpha channel. I couldn't get it to work in Gimp but it worked with DXTBmp. All I did was create the lettering in white and added a black background. I merged the layers and exported as a tga file. I added the tga file in DXTBmp and added an alpha channel there and it replaced all the black with the light green alpha. I saved as a DXT1 (since only black and white) I was able to open in FSDSv3 and add the textures. Tested in FS and worked well. I'm sure I will have more difficult issues later but for now I am good.
I'm almost done!! Yeah!:rotfl:
 
Hi!
ecagan said:
Just a quick update. I figured out how to add the alpha channel. I couldn't get it to work in Gimp but it worked with DXTBmp. All I did was create the lettering in white and added a black background. I merged the layers and exported as a tga file. I added the tga file in DXTBmp and added an alpha channel there and it replaced all the black with the light green alpha.
Click to expand...
I have also tried to use Gimp to create an alpha channel, but without any success. When I save the gimp-file as a psd-file, the imagetools says the file have no alpha channel. I also tried the tga-format and now imagetools recognize the alpha channel. But I have not been able to create an alpha channel according to the wiki-article http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/ind...to_create_transparant_textures_with_PhotoShop
So I also turned to the DXTBmp solution and now I can create transparent textures :)
But I still doesn't know if it's possible to use Gimp and ImageTool for transparent textures in FS9. But it's not a big drawback because now I can use the DXTBmp program instead of the ImageTool.
 
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