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Textures transparency ...how to get colors to show..


greekrage

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Well ..ive got some transparent textures to finally work but not as intended..

 

How do i get the colors of a texture to show ?

 

Is it a setting in the material file or something i need to do to the nif....

 

In the pic you can see the actual texture in the UV editor but the nif is only displaying the normal i think...and the env map

 

MWxXK2.jpg

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I don't see the alpha working on that mesh. That looks like a solid plane with uniform opacity.

 

Alpha Test & threshold : this will "test" the alpha map (gray scale, 8 bit, 0 - 255) against the threshold value. If the gray scale value is lower than the threshold, that part of map won't be visible. This is basically an On/Off switch, and is what you want for chain link fence.

 

Fallout 4 engine uses BC3 and above for Alpha (full 8 bit). BC1 hack is not used in the vanilla Fallout 4 texture with alpha, as far as I know.

 

Simple Alpha Test doesn't use BGEM, by the way. Take a look at Bethesda's chain link fence material.

 

 

About vertex color : I think vertex color is blended with "multiply" in-game. It is often used as "fade to black" effect on meshes. It's also used for darkening the cracks on glass material, like for that BldGlassNoBarTrans nif, which has vertex color values of R = 128, G = 128, B = 128 (middle gray).

 

BldGlassNoBarTrans uses Alpha Blend + Additive BGEM. This is not what you want for chain link fence.

Edited by DiodeLadder
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I don't see the alpha working on that mesh. That looks like a solid plane with uniform opacity.

 

Alpha Test & threshold : this will "test" the alpha map (gray scale, 8 bit, 0 - 255) against the threshold value. If the gray scale value is lower than the threshold, that part of map won't be visible. This is basically an On/Off switch, and is what you want for chain link fence.

 

Fallout 4 engine uses BC3 and above for Alpha (full 8 bit). BC1 hack is not used in the vanilla Fallout 4 texture with alpha, as far as I know.

 

Simple Alpha Test doesn't use BGEM, by the way. Take a look at Bethesda's chain link fence material.

 

 

About vertex color : I think vertex color is blended with "multiply" in-game. It is often used as "fade to black" effect on meshes. It's also used for darkening the cracks on glass material, like for that BldGlassNoBarTrans nif, which has vertex color values of R = 128, G = 128, B = 128 (middle gray).

 

BldGlassNoBarTrans uses Alpha Blend + Additive BGEM. This is not what you want for chain link fence.

wow very informative..

Before you posted i had managed to get most of my glass textures to finally work (thats why youre seeing the glass plane ....

I accomplished this by using that glass and its material file as a template...

I also removed everything from the the files i downloaded and only used the Diff and normal maps (i think the height and other maps were also causing the issue....

Big question...

If a texture has alpha and has to be compressed with highest possible ...does this also go for the other maps like normal or just the diffuse ? ( i basically open the files i download in gimp and export them as dds from there..)

In those file many also have a "opacity" file... Do i use this and how ?....(if im not mistaken its needed with textures like fences etc. )

 

This btw is what i finally did with using ONLY the Diffuse and Normal maps .....

htGQI3.jpg

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Ah, so that wasn't a chain link fence, lol. Sorry about that. :tongue:

 

The opacity map is supposed to be packed into the alpha channel of _d.dds (diffuse), and diffuse map need to be encoded in BC3 or higher. The _d.dds map uses RGBA format (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha = 4 channels of 8 bit data), and this "A" channel is where your opacity map should go to. I don't know how the channel editing works in GIMP, but I assume there's a way to paste grayscale data into a channel like in other image editing software. There are quite a few people using GIMP for texture editing, so hopefully someone who know would chime in.

 

I am guessing the opacity map in your case would make the cutout for the the frames only. I think it is better in this case to use 2 meshes : 1 for glass (BGEM), and 1 for frame (BGSM), so that the frame would look more solid and give the asset more dimension. Right now you have the alpha blend additive on the whole thing, so the frame won't look solid.

 

If you have downloaded the texture from the net somewhere, you might want to see if the normal map of your texture is in DirectX or OpenGL (this should be noted on the source website). Most 3d software uses normal map in OpenGL format, while Fallout 4 uses DirectX normal. If you use OpenGL normal in Fallout 4, your texture may look like it's getting light from a wrong direction. If you have the normal in OpenGL, you would need to invert the Green channel of your normal map.

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