creating alpha-channel textures (decals)

[fury]

Hi guys,

I have a question again… I hope you can help me. I created a texture for my crossfire map. This time the helipads-texture. I wanted to make a decal with the paintings and transparent background to place it on the helipads and have really well scaled concrete-floor texture below the decal. My question is… How can I create and save alpha channels (using photoshop CS5) into a .tga file? I will use VTFedit to convert the .tga to a material file afterwards. So far I could not manage to save the alpha channels into the tga. Or atleast they aren’t transparent when loaded in Hammer. When I go to “channels” in photoshop, i already have a channel called alpha. I can see that the non-tansparent parts are drawn white on that channel. The tansparent parts are black… So… Can I save this alpha channel using photoshop or do I need a different program? I downloaded gimp now. If I can do it with gimp, how do I have to do it?

Thx for any help

[Crypt]

Sounds like your image itself is fine. The alpha channel is part of the image, as long as you export as pretty much anything other than JPG, should be fine.

Ensure you’re using the DXT5 VTF format, and that you’re enabling the $translucent parameter in your VMT.

[fury]

Ok very much thanks for your tips again I used photoshop’s export feature this time (clicked render video and made it 1 frame in .tga format) and it saved the alpha channel. Then I put $translucent 1 in the .vmt and it worked. Thx a lot!

[bkdale86]

Go to your channels tab and make sure you have a r, g, b and alpha channels there. Next make sure you have a grayscale (black and white) layer in it. Then when you save your tga it HAS to be saved as a 32bit tga or your alpha channel won’t be saved.