Translucent Objects Inquiry

[Septa Scarabae]

Has anyone been able to successfully implement translucent objects, weapons or armor? I've been playing around with Alpha channels, shaders, meshes and more, trying to come up with anything. I have been able to make items disappear, make parts of items disappear, make items abnormally shiny, create partial glows and in one case, make the back of a shield partially translucent. In most cases I wasn't able to get any altered effect at all:



In this one, if you look closely, you can see the NPCs feet through the center of the shield:

[Yoshiboy]

yeah, basically you need to copy the material values from "partical_blend" making sure you keep all of the hidden hex values. This might even have to be done using hex editing (i dont know if BRFedit supports it)

With these material values the level of alpha should represent the level of trasparency

[Septa Scarabae]

I'll give it a try with BRF Edit and see what it does.

[Septa Scarabae]

Copying the material and renaming it worked perfectly. Thank you kindly for that tip.

[Highelf]

Is there anyway to get a non-transparent area around the transparent area..

If yes care to explain, Star wars mod might be able to use this for lightsabers and laser 'bullets'

[Stonewall382]

Cooool!

[Raz]

This is the stuff I need right here! Could you make a semi-transparant texture? It has to be plain white (prefably grass-sized) with the background half-ish shining through. You know, the effect the ground gives when it's hot. I was planning on replacing the grass with something, and then this thread showed up. If you think you can do it, and want to do it, pm me please.

Thanks in advance,

Raz.

[Janus]

Is there anyway to get a non-transparent area around the transparent area..

If yes care to explain, Star wars mod might be able to use this for lightsabers and laser 'bullets'

One way is to make the item use multiple meshes, with one mesh set up to use the translucent material and another mesh set up to use a regular opaque material.
To make an item have more than one mesh, simply load each mesh into BRFedit, set their materials as needed, and name them with the ending character as "1", "2", etc. That naming convention makes the game show them as a combined mesh, which is used in some doors, scenes (like Zendar), and other items.

Of course you can simply have the alpha set to make some areas solid, as shown in one of the above screenshots.

[Septa Scarabae]

Is there anyway to get a non-transparent area around the transparent area..

If yes care to explain, Star wars mod might be able to use this for lightsabers and laser 'bullets'

Easily. Now, of course, all credit goes to Yoshi, but I'll go step by step through what I did. Mind you I'm using Adobe Photoshop:

Step 1: Back up the materials.brf file.

Step 2: Launch BRF Edit and open the materials.brf file.

Step 3: Click particle_blend and hit Clone.

Step 4: Scroll down to the clone and edit the name to the material you're using for your texture.

Step 5: If you don't want a design on your texture, color over it with a solid color.

Step 6: Select the Alpha layer channel and create it as a solid color. White is solid, black is completely translucent. Any in between will of course vary your translucency.

Kind of a quick mock-up so you get the idea:

This is the stuff I need right here! Could you make a semi-transparant texture? It has to be plain white (prefably grass-sized) with the background half-ish shining through. You know, the effect the ground gives when it's hot. I was planning on replacing the grass with something, and then this thread showed up. If you think you can do it, and want to do it, pm me please.

To be honest, I have no clue what you just asked.

[Septa Scarabae]

Was playing around with water textures and found toys armagan left me in Tihr. Anyways, I'm likely to be sitting on this for a few days.

[Highelf]

thanks for the little tut, but i'm using Paint shop pro 9
...
I guess step 5 & 6 are done in photoshop.. anyway to do it in Psp 9 ? thanks in advance
btw: i'll look to if I see anything that has to do with alpha channels in psp..I hope so 

[Septa Scarabae]

I'm not familiar with Paint Shop Pro v.9, so I couldn't honestly say whether it lets you edit Alpha channels or not. Only step 6 deals directly with Photoshop.

[Thorgrim]

If PSP is still the way it was in version 7, you select Mask > Load from alpha channel, or Mask > New if you are making a new DDS.

Then you edit it in mask edit mode, and re save it to the alpha channel.

Glad people are playing with some more interesting materials now.  Maybe it is time to add some of the shader editing options to BRFEdit, that would allow a lot more fancy effects like these

[Septa Scarabae]

Glad people are playing with some more interesting materials now.  Maybe it is time to add some of the shader editing options to BRFEdit, that would allow a lot more fancy effects like these

If you get the time to do such, that'd make my day. I was attempting to play with translucent objects back in M&B v.0.711 with BRF View and the Unofficial Editor, but neither was very helpful. Not to mention BRF View was a very unstable program.

[Janus]

Glad people are playing with some more interesting materials now.  Maybe it is time to add some of the shader editing options to BRFEdit, that would allow a lot more fancy effects like these

Oh yeah, that would be awesome indeed.