Humbly, I need help making textures with transparencies.

[templeofninpo]

I've done it before. Years ago. Now have been trying to hunt down sites and instructions, but cannot find anything that can tell me the process and proper Photoshop settings.

Basically, I'm wanting to make graffiti. So far I have a 1024x512 billboard texture and would like to snip out bits to see through.

It has something to do with 'alpha'.

[jlf65]

The alpha channel tells how transparent a pixel is. 0 is fully transparent, while 255 is fully opaque. Watch the format you save in - some formats have no alpha channel at all and strip the image of transparency. Some formats only save a single bit of the alpha, allowing full transparency or full opacity with no in between values. This is especially important with compressed textures as the compression modes used by DirectX (the version used with DX9 at least) have this issue of having no alpha, a one bit alpha, or a (mostly) full alpha.

[RoyBatty]

DXT1 has 1 bit alpha, so 0 or 1. DXT5 has 256 levels of alpha. Choose the appropriate one.

[templeofninpo]

Will the normal map need particular settings in photoshop?

[RoyBatty]

Normals keep the specular in the alpha channel so be sure to make a specular map and copy it to the alpha channel and use DXT5. If you do not create a specular it will default to all white which is super shiny.

[templeofninpo]

My process (which fails, so far).

I have an endgame slide I've been adding Texture Sets to.

In Photoshop I duplicate the background then delete it so I'll be able to erase sections with nothing underneath them. I save with DXT5 then use the normal map filter (and I've little clue what any of the settings mean) and again save in DXT5. I load into the geck and no transparency... I imagine there is something fundamental that I'm missing.

[templeofninpo]

Oh thank gosh. I appreciate the input on this thread though I finally figured it out from the first half of this guide (http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php ... -textures/) and the 'Saving Texture (DDS) with Transparency' tip from here (https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Ge ... ansparency).