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Transparent textures in interiors

by Jason Farmer · in Technical Issues · 01/01/2004 (7:56 pm) · 4 replies

How do I make a texture for an interior to be partly transparent? (Not translucent, that's a different issue completely.. or is it?)

I have made a png texture with an alpha channel which looks like a chainlink fence.
The alpha channel is set up so that the areas between the chain links are transparent.

I create a solid in Worldcraft and apply the texture to it.

I export it to Torque and run my map.

The transparency seems to be completely ignored.

Am I missing something out here?

Do I need to tell torque some other way that the texture has some transparent areas?

Cheers

Jason

#1
01/02/2004 (9:06 am)
Jason, the standard Torque engine does not support interior transparency or translucency, however there are several patches available from the private sdk area. Notably:

Interior transparency www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=4648 by Chris "Deus_ex_Machina" Weber.

You can also get it as part of Mark Harmon's PathedInteriors Upgrade www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=4980

but that also includes the pathedinterior and radiosity stuff.

PS: I see you are an SDK owner, so perhaps this post should have gone into the private SDK area.

PPS: Once you've got the transparency patch, you can set the level of translucency of the alpha channel to get murky/dirty windows etc.

Anyway, hope this helps you out.
#2
01/02/2004 (1:50 pm)
Thanks Matthew.

I didn't realise that transparent textures were not supported until earlier. So I attempted to apply Chris's patch after searching the resources. I'm having problems with it, but that's not for solving here.

Once the Mark Harmon patch settles a bit (there seem to be some compiler issues) I'll use that one I think as it adds radiosity, moving brushes and transparency.. all the things that seem to be missing.

Thanks for the link to that one, I had no idea it existed.

Cheers

Jason
#3
01/02/2004 (4:17 pm)
Just to clear up somethings.

Marks patch works fine, the radiostiy stuff isnt included, you need to d/l the source to that, but once you have the tgerad source, just enable the radiosity defines.
Get it from www.actionrpg.com/twiki/bin/view.cgi/Main/TorqueRadiosity

Transparent stuff, this is also disabled by defines, if you include the interiortrans code in your project, you will need to enable it with the defines.
These are:
USE_RADIOSITY
_INTERIOR_TRANS_FASTSORT_
USE_TRANSENTITIES
#4
02/25/2004 (8:29 am)
I am trying to include transparent textures in my buildings. That is on the railing. well the tranparency works fine apart just that i have planes behind the polygon with the transparent texture which appear to be infront of the polygon with the texture.
Is there some display priority issue here???