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PNG?? Opacity of Alpha?

by Bobby Leighton · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 03/29/2007 (7:44 am) · 8 replies

Alright Ive used transparencies to make grass, and leaves for my trees in Photo-shop. Awesome!!
Now i want to save an alpha channel in a PNG, there is even a couple of tutorials in the TDN that talk about making blended terrains for Atlas2, you supposed to put one of each of the different masks you make to hide/show texture. There all supposed to be combined together, well how do you do that when it wont save to Alpha channel..so how did you guys do it? I know the directions cant be wrong they must be leaving out a step they assume is obvious, is all that i can think. I even got the old version of SuperPNG, i thought that might be it, and i removed the PNG plug-in that photo-shop uses, but no alpha channel support, targa and tiff work fine, but after i save the PNG, and open it back up there is no alpha. please help for my other project this is very import as we cant test without terrain:)
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Employee David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
#1
03/29/2007 (8:01 am)
As strange as it sounds, I use GiMP for PNG's. I save out my PSD's and load them up in GiMP, export the PNG's and then run them through OptiPNG to strip out any munged headers, etc. It's an extra step, but it usually kills the common problems with Photoshop and PNG's.

Torque 3D Owner Bobby Leighton
#2
03/29/2007 (8:18 am)
Ill try it

Torque 3D Owner Phil Carlisle
#3
03/29/2007 (2:56 pm)
I use photoshop 6 with photoshop 5's PNG plugin, its the only one I could ever get to work.

Torque Owner Magnus Blikstad
#4
03/29/2007 (3:10 pm)
Are you sure you used the correct SuperPNG? The one on the SuperPNG site won't work.
Try this one. www.garagegames2.com/web/exporters/SuperPNG.8bi. Make ABSOLUTELY sure the photoshop png plugin is moved as far away as possible from the plugins folder. It SHOULD work. It works just fine here anyway.

Torque Owner Deception Games
#5
04/20/2007 (11:09 pm)
But in Photoshop are you suppose to copy the raw files into the RGB Channel?

Torque 3D Owner Bobby Leighton
#6
04/22/2007 (8:27 am)
No...the separate opacity files L3dt makes on export of opacity channels, you copy each one of these into a single RPGA, PNG...make sure the alpha saves, I'm still having trouble even though i removed all references of the original PNG importer, but I installed the Gimp and it works perfectly.

Torque 3D Owner Jeff Loveless
#7
04/22/2007 (9:57 am)
Can I ask, since i had a problem with this as well, when I try the superPNG plugin in Photoshop 7 Photoshop crashes, I didnt see any file that was screaming "im the default png plugin" so I didn't know what to move out of those folders.

Is there a version that works in Ps7 ? or what's the filename of the file that needs moved out?

I did find a very old, very crummy plugin to save PNG's that gives ONE option, save with alpha layer..

I guess since it works I shouldnt whine but superPNG just looks so snazzy, it would make me feel alot better than this "i was built in notepad" plugin

Torque 3D Owner Guimo
#8
04/23/2007 (10:09 am)
I have always used the SuperPNG plugin (the one pointed by Magnus in his post) and works with all Photoshop versions. Im now using it with Photoshop CS. You dont have to delete the original PNG plugin (but is recommended). Just remember to pick SuperPNG as your fine type when you save and remember to click the Save Alpha Channel check.

Luck!
Guimo