DeleD Community Edition

[Sindwiller]

Hi everyone.

I have searched the whole DeleD and DeleD Pro Forum, but i cannot find an answer. How i make things transparent??

mfg, Sindwiller

[trucker2000]

You use a .tga pic.
_________________
Some day I will grow up and be a real modeler.
"Never give up! Never surrender!!"
Sys specs:
asus
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Invidia gtx560 video card
Windows 8 (worst op sys Ever)

[Sindwiller]

Yes and? Just convert the texture to .tga?

mfg, Sindwiller

[trucker2000]

I took my texture, made an alpha map of it, combined them into a tga, then used that as the texture. It works well on rectangles. (if you want a window, other wise, any object will do.)
Edit to add:
set the Blendmode of the texture to Alphablend in the inspector.
_________________
Some day I will grow up and be a real modeler.
"Never give up! Never surrender!!"
Sys specs:
asus
8 gigs ram
Invidia gtx560 video card
Windows 8 (worst op sys Ever)

[Paul-Jan]

There are indeed two ways of creating a transparent material in DeleD.
- use a texture with transparency information (a so-called "alpha layer"). We currently only support .tga for that.
- use a solid color material, and give it an alpha value < 255.

Make sure to set the blendmode to alphablend, and you are there.

Note: what DeleD does _not_ allow you to do, is take any ordinary non-transparent texture and "make it transparent". You will have to provide the alpha-information as a separate layer within the texture. Most decent drawing programs (Photoshop, PSP, etc.), as well as some dedicated tools (TGA maker, etc) will provide functionality for this.

[nextdoorscat]

ok so now I'm confused... how do you combine a texture and alpha map into a .tga? (never created .tga files before)

[trucker2000]

This is an easy and Free tga tool that you can use to make tgas for transperancy.
Take your texture into psp or another program, make an alpha map of it, bring it into tga tool 1.1 and combine them. Done. You have a .tga with alpha mapping.
_________________
Some day I will grow up and be a real modeler.
"Never give up! Never surrender!!"
Sys specs:
asus
8 gigs ram
Invidia gtx560 video card
Windows 8 (worst op sys Ever)

[Daaark]

If you have PSP why would you use another tool to make an alpha layer? Just save your alpha map into picture.

Masks->Save to alpha channel.

[nextdoorscat]

I just made a tga file, put it in one of the subfolders in the textures file, looked at it in the material editor, and it is coming up 'invalid file data'.

It is just one layer with an alpha layer...

[Daaark]

[nextdoorscat]

Hmm, I dont have PSP - but I used the tga tool and it worked a treat. I've had problems before with programs not reading the formats exported from the image editing program I am using, so I guess that may have been the problem.

Thanks for your help all!

Now is there any way I can get the image size down from one MB?

[Daaark]

[Paul-Jan]

Vampyre has done an excellent job of providing answers this far, so all I have to add is this remark:

DeleD does support reading of compressed TGA files (largely untested because kinda rare), so if you have to tools to make them then you should be able to work with them. However, TGA compression comes down to a simple "run-length encoding" scheme, which is fairly useless for photo-realistic textures.

[Daaark]

[nextdoorscat]

Thank you both - this is very informative, I have a lot to learn both in theory and practice!

The only reason I wondered is because in my limited experience I had previously only used textures for ultimate use in Atmosphere and of course still think in download times (the smaller the file the better) so I guess .tga would not be an ideal format in this case! But it looks beautiful in DeleD, and now practicing with transparency - thank you!