Create A Texture With Transparent Area

[Hyperion[matt]]

I am not using gmax anymore, but there must be a way to load the staticmesh shader for each material. Have you pressed the "Pick" Button? Maybe you can load the shader then. Try to get a copy of 3dsmax, gmax is crap, got a lot of bugs when I made my first tries to export models into BF2.

Does anyone know how to get specularity working on transparency textures for staticmeshs?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

copy of 3dsmax, gmax is crap,

Not to go too deep into this discussion but gmax is very nice for getting accustomed to the industry standard of 3D modelling the 'Max Way' as gmax is a spin-off from Max 4 . And its free. and it comes with a set of very good tutorials which everyone ( even a veteran Max user ) can profit from.

Material: I'm coming back here when i have run my gmax. Changing the type of material is normally done by pressing the 'Mtl #0 Standard' button in the Material Manager or by deleting the existing materials and adding your StaticMesh stuff instead.

I'll brb to let you know.

Edit: Ok, i found it . It sounds a bit confusing so read closely

Create your Multi Material and an additional BF2StaticMesh material which can reside outside the Multi Material. Open the Material Navigator ( the 3 colored balls in MM ):

Ok, now drag and drop your BF2StaticMesh material onto the 'MTL #18 Standard' Button to convert it to BF2StaticMesh:

Repeat for the other material. Now you're ready to fill in the textures into both materials.

Does anyone know how to get specularity working on transparency textures for staticmeshs?

I'm checking that , too. I *think* its the alpha channel of your bump (NDetail) map but i'll double check that.

Edit: Well, i can't find an obvious place for gloss on alpha'd materials. Our transparent parts are mostly from metal ( fences, grates and such ) where a high gloss is required and they all use something similar to /objects_client.zip/staticobjects/common/textures/common_alpha_01_de.dds and the common_alpha_01_deb.dds which has no alpha channel at all. It might be that the high gloss comes from the non-existent alpha in the normal map and you could try to add the gloss channel to it.

Edited March 14, 2010 by mschoeldgen[Xww2]

[kumade]

to mschoeldgen[Xww2]:

You are a great moderator, really . I never saw such level of assistance to users at any forums.

And thanks again, this method works indeed.

p.s. By the way, is there a way to reload texture in bf editor? It's caching object's texture on first load, and now i need to restart editor every time i changing texture.

Edited March 14, 2010 by kumade

[Hyperion[matt]]

To reload your textures on the fly go to Tools/Options/ReloadFileSettings

Edit: Thanks mschoeldgen[Xww] for your research. Seems that there is no way to get a really working specularmap on a transparency texture (for statics). Adding a alphachannel to the normalmaps reduces the gloss but you can't control it like on the detailtextures alphachannel.

Not to go too deep into this discussion but gmax is very nice for getting accustomed to the industry standard of 3D modelling the 'Max Way' as gmax is a spin-off from Max 4 . And its free. and it comes with a set of very good tutorials which everyone ( even a veteran Max user ) can profit from.

You're right its not crap, its ok for making first steps in 3d-modeling. But due to a lot of bugs and the bad uvw-mapping options I learned not very much about modeling at all. When i got 3dsmax7 it was like heaven, cause everything worked as it should and it got much more options that makes modeling and texturing easier. For every student with interests in 3d modeling i recommend to buy a copy of 3ds - you will never get it so cheap again.

Edited March 14, 2010 by Hyperion[matt]

[kumade]

To reload your textures on the fly go to Tools/Options/ReloadFileSettings

Thanks!! This will hardly improve my performance

For every student with interests in 3d modeling i recommend to buy a copy of 3ds - you will never get it so cheap again.

Well, i used 3dmax before, for a long time, just for fun and not very legally Then i used Maya in same way.

But now i'm modeling stuffs not for fun, but for community mod. So i have to use free software, like Blender (in which i do all model work) and gmax (mapping and export). And as long as this is my hobby (i'm a web-programmer, not a modeler), i'm not ready to waste almost entire moth-payment to buy 3dmax

[UberWazuSoldier]

I beg to differ. How would you apply two different shader techniques to a single model ?

It's no harder without multi-materials than it is with them, or did I misinterpret what you said?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Indeed - i'm not a 100% gmax defender as it is surely crippled when it comes to import and export capabilities . But i will never forget that my very first model for BF1942 was made with it and it really worked . As a free program its one of the more capable programs ( if you ever tried such crap like google sketch or other semi-demi toys)

Reloading textures is very easy in the editor by assembling a command in the command line . The commandline will autocomplete your line . Enter the following command:

textureManager.reloadTextures <partOfTextureName>

Now, <partOfTextureName> stands for a few letters of your texture, e.g. entering 'tx0' would reload all textures with 'tx0' in the name, like detailmaps, colormaps and terrain lightmaps. Very handy if you just re-lightmapped an object or the terrain. If you'd enter 'mecity' it would reload all those static textures with 'mecity' in the name.

Edited March 15, 2010 by mschoeldgen[Xww2]

[UberWazuSoldier]

Ahhhhh, so on gmax you need to have them all on the one multi-material? That's annoying - although I agree that gmax is a great free program. I prefer the layout of gmax and 3dsmax to blender; it's a lot cleaner.

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Ahhhhh, so on gmax you need to have them all on the one multi-material? That's annoying

Can't say so I'm using Multi/Sub materials in all my models ( where need be ) and its a standard operation for me to set it up and use it, regardless if its Max or gmax. I prefer to have my materials in this one spot where i have overview over all visible- and collisionmaterials.

Its also easy to force a complete Multi/Sub setup onto a new mesh - no need to browse through all the material 'balls' in the MM.

[kumade]

I have another one issue with transparency. I want to create static mesh consists of ammo box and rocket inside it.

And i want to attach this label to my rocket.

I have planned to do this by attaching some small plane to rocket, and place this texture on it. So white area should be transparent and i dont need to model label shape. But according to this post

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showt...ost&p=96826

looks like i cant have transparency on static meshes? Because list of static mesh shaders doesnt contains working alpha shaders. Is that true or i missunderstood something?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Use the crack channel - it provides transparency per se and a crack texture is not hard to make. Have a look at the textures ending in _cr.dds

Btw, NVidia provides a nice little helper program for examining all kinds of DDS textures. Look for 'Windows Texture Viewer' on the NVidia site:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/windows...ure_viewer.html

Edited March 19, 2010 by mschoeldgen[Xww2]

[kumade]

Use the crack channel - it provides transparency per se and a crack texture is not hard to make. Have a look at the textures ending in _cr.dds

Btw, NVidia provides a nice little helper program for examining all kinds of DDS textures. Look for 'Windows Texture Viewer' on the NVidia site:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/windows...ure_viewer.html

Thanks for advices.

And i want to ask another one thing. I can't find any forum for BFmeshView util, so i'll post it here.

1. Is it normal that when i open *.collisionmesh file in BFMeshView it shows some of cols in pink color and some in light blue?

Almost all collision meshes are displayed in light blue, but for some reason, some meshes looks like that:

This means that something wrong with my col-mesh?

2. When i use multimaterial on my model, and, for example, i have 3 submaterials, which assigned to different model's polygons, then bfMeshView shows strange results for polygons count. By example this model in gmax object properties window has 2807 tris:

But when i browse it in BFMV, it shows 6196 tris!

For example, Mat 0 is assigned to both rockets, and each of them has about 830 tris. But BFMV shows 3290 polygons count for this material.

On the other hand, it shows correct result for Mat 1, which assigned exactly to 290 polys.

It's some BFMV bug or something wrong with my model?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

I think BFMeshView is right - Rexman posted an update to the 3DMax tools which was never done for the gmax package addressing this problem. But you can update your scripts manually . Here's the thread addressing the update:

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5980

Note how i ask about gmax a few posts down and Rexmans answer:

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showt...ost&p=41828

[kumade]

I think BFMeshView is right - Rexman posted an update to the 3DMax tools which was never done for the gmax package addressing this problem. But you can update your scripts manually . Here's the thread addressing the update:

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5980

Note how i ask about gmax a few posts down and Rexmans answer:

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showt...ost&p=41828

Great, thanks.

And what about pink col-meshes?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

And what about pink col-meshes?

Oh, i like them

Note that the editor can render the collisionmeshes , too. If you're in doubt show them in the editor. Apart from that i guess Remdul simply did the coloring to show that they have different materials. Maybe he drops in and tells us about it.

[kumade]

Oh, i like them

Note that the editor can render the collisionmeshes , too. If you're in doubt show them in the editor. Apart from that i guess Remdul simply did the coloring to show that they have different materials. Maybe he drops in and tells us about it.

Looks like it depends somehow from materials, yes. In my object they have had the same material as main mesh. And some of them were blue and some - pink. But now i removed any material from col-meshes and they all becomes blue

I hope this will not cause any troubles if col meshes will not have material assigned to them ?

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Well, somehow you have to apply a material to them else you cannot assign BF2 materials to them. These materials , though can be of 'Standard' type and should be a Sub Material in your existing Multi/Sub collection.

In the generated *.con file you'll then find something like

ObjectTemplate.mapMaterial 0 tent_material 0
ObjectTemplate.mapMaterial 1 wood 0

Here i applied two material ID'S to the collsionmeshes and the name is the one you give the material in gmax.

Edited March 24, 2010 by mschoeldgen[Xww2]