Blender help: alpha textures ..

[scighera]

There is someone out there that could be so kind to try to explain me what i do wrong in assigning material properties ??

The screenshots below are a ModelConverterX rendering of two objects exported from blender to .X with the exporter made by capt_x. (The sim gives the same results)

The 1st screenshot is relevant to:

A) A cab, having a texture including an alpha channel, set to "Opaque, Two sided";
B) An advertizing sign, having a texture including an alpha channel, set to " Transparent, Two sided";

So the cab doesn't show the alpha of the windows.

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The second screenshot is relevant to:
A) A cab, having a texture including an alpha channel, set to "Transparent, Two sided";
B) An advertizing sign, having a texture including an alpha channel, set to " Transparent, Two sided".

All the settings of the material of the "cab" and the material of the "sign" are the same ....

But what wrong with the cab ????????????

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Can you show a wireframe? Or, in Blender, a shot with 'Backface culling' switched on? To be found in the Properties (N) tab Shading.

 

[scighera]

Hope I undesrtood correctly what you mean

Note: the texture.dds of the cab is flipped, the advertizing sign texture.dds isn't; so in the ModelConverterX the sign shows upsidedown.

In the MCX view of the cab, with the alpha set on, I recognize the profile of the wheel (present in the texture); it seem that the texture is applied two times to the cab; the first as unwrapped in blender, the second time it seems that the surfaces has been unwrapped as a cube and the texture is used just as an alpha channel on/off (hopee I was clear in the explication )

Here teh shots:

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Allright, your faces seem to be ok! Good normal direction.

You're right, the thing that causes the unwanted alpha looks like the same texture, but upside down.

I'm going to think!

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Ok, I think that the map that causes the alpha, as you mentioned in your first post up here, case 2, is not properly unwrapped like the diffuse texture.

Maybe you can check this?

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

The 1,3 side of your cab has a flipped alpha map in x-direction, and the other unwraps (the ones you show selected) seem to be vertical flipped on the alpha map.

Nice cab btw!

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Just looked a bit closer to your screenies. The outlined droplist has to show 'UV' instead of 'Generated'.



Hope this will work out! I'm sorry that this took me a few replies

Keep going scighera!

 

[arno]

You probably need to flip your dds texture. FS uses a different origin than some other programs. So normally you need to vertically flip the texture before saving to dds (Imagetool does this automatically).

 

[scighera]

You probably need to flip your dds texture. FS uses a different origin than some other programs. So normally you need to vertically flip the texture before saving to dds (Imagetool does this automatically).

Arno the .dds texture of the cab "is" flipped !
The .dds of the sign (Funivie del Monte Bianco) isn't, and in MCX shows upside down ...

 

[scighera]

Just looked a bit closer to your screenies. The outlined droplist has to show 'UV' instead of 'Generated'.

.....

Hope this will work out! I'm sorry that this took me a few replies

Keep going scighera!

No way: put "UV" in the Mapping dropdown menu; the result doesn't change; and actually the other object texturing (the sign) has the same setting (Mapping Coord : Generatedd) and shows up fine in MCX ...

Should youu have the patience to chek the .blend file, it's here:
http://www.paolacolleoni.it/FSX/FM_Cabs_1stLeg.zip

Thanks anyhow

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

I looked into the .dds using Paint.NET, and saw this:



So I assume this is a texture problem.

I'll continue, and keep u posting!

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Oké, there we go!

I changed the texture to 512x512, so adding a huge space below it.
Then I selected in Blender Mapping -> UV, map: UVMap (default, but you must select it as far as I know.)
Exported it by FSX, selecting ALL three options, and suddenly, in MCX it appeared like this!



Also converted the changed png to dds using MCX Texture Converter.
So, something is possible! But I still need to find out what went exactly wrong

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Scighera, I still can't give you exactly the hint, but it seems that it has to do with the image size.

And it looks like the model won't like it when you put two UV's 'on top of each other'. You can see the triangles crossing here, while the transparent issue as seen in my previous post seems to correspond with this.



I can advice you anyway to close MCX and start it up again when you again import a model. I don't know why, but it works...

 

[capt_x]

To me, it looks like you flipped only the RGB channels, but not the alpha channel. In photoshop, always use Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Canvas vertical to flip your image. If you use Edit > Transform, make sure the alpha channel is selected.

To repair your texture, select only the alpha channel and flip it.

 

[capt_x]

After some playing around with the material settings, I got this:

Here are the material settings:

Hope this helps.

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

Probably.

It has the disadvantage that, the higher the number of Alpha Test Level is, the more black colors will be blended transparent. I did the same as Felix, first with 138, which gave the 'white' windows transparent, and the 'grey' not. Entering 200 resulted in this. But one can see that other grey colors are transparent as well.

I tried 'Double sided' for my Fokker transparent parts, and got the same result: triangles that cancel each other out.

 

[scighera]

After some playing around with the material settings, I got this:

Here are the material settings:


Hope this helps.

Wunderbar .... it's exactly what I was looking for my cab !!!!
May be I will have to reduce the opacity I used for the windows (or icrease the alpha level ..)

thanks a lot Felix you are a

 

[capt_x]

Probably.

It has the disadvantage that, the higher the number of Alpha Test Level is, the more black colors will be blended transparent. I did the same as Felix, first with 138, which gave the 'white' windows transparent, and the 'grey' not. Entering 200 resulted in this. But one can see that other grey colors are transparent as well.

I tried 'Double sided' for my Fokker transparent parts, and got the same result: triangles that cancel each other out.

I would suggest modelling the windows of the cabin separately and applying a dedicated glass material to them. Of course, this increases polycount and drawcalls.

 

[scighera]

I looked into the .dds using Paint.NET, and saw this:



So I assume this is a texture problem.

I'll continue, and keep u posting!

The texture as seen in the above pisture is quite interesting: it recall exactly what I was seing in MCX rebdering,
For the textures I use firefox ... may be iot's the image editor making this mess !!! May be its better I "clean" the texture with gimp ...
Many, many thanks to both of you Blender gurus

Now I hope the matter of the long animation will come to a similar nice end !

 

[Dutcheeseblend]

One ever noticed the Transparency checkbox under Display in the Object window?

You'll get this, very convenient!
But this same pic shows that I'm still struggling with the trans parts. By the way, this effect only appears when faces are triangulated (so in FSX as well...)