Making a masked Texture

[G-Man]

I'm not sure if that's the right terminology, but I want to make a texture that has a grill that you can see through. What determines which part of the texture will be see through, ie masked?

[G-Man]

Ok, I read a few old threads on this but I'm still a bit lost. Seems the color of index 0 will be the one to be masked. OK, so I opened up the .pcx I want to modify in photoshop and I'm given a colour index of the numbers so I chose 0,0,0. I tired it in ued compiled and played and the colour wasn't see through.

I'm a bit of a novice with photoshop, could someone please spell out the steps for me to get the right colour for masking purposes. It would be greatly appreciated.

While I'm here I might ask if anyone has got any good maksed metal grill floor textuires that they could e-mail me. I'm looking to make a fire excape on the back of a building and I haven't found anything good for it yet.

[[MUTTS] Das]

You know who knows how to do this? GunnerX has done it with some of my textures. I don't know if I can give out his e-mail, but I'll mention this thread to him and hopefully he can help you out.

Scott
[muTTs]Das
Texture Universe (http://www.Textureuniverse.com)

[Ingenue]

Masked Textures 101:

If parts of this don't work, feel free to eamil me with questions. It's been a while since I had to *think* about how to do this......

In Photoshop, make sure youe texture mode is RGB. Make sure the edges of your masked color (don't use 0,0,0, try something really garish like 256, 256, 0) are clean, no antialiasing.

Goto Image ---- Mode ---- Index color

Change your Palette option to Custom

Swap your colors around so that the masked color you want is in the very first position.

Save it out as a .bmp file.

That should do it.

-I

[G-Man]

Ok, thanks for the tips, here is my first round of questions:

1) How do I ensure my texture mode is RGB?

2) Where is the Pallette and how do I change it to custom?

Sorry for the dumb ass question but all I've ever used this program for is doodling, resizing and touching up scanned pictures!

[G-Man]

I started another thread for this question but it kinda pertains to my original problem so forgive me if I add it onto here aswell!:

Well here is another question, I want to use a masked texture from a Deus Ex texture pack from the in the coretexmetal.utx package. However when I export the desired textuure to .pcx from the deus ex texture pack and then import the .pcx into the map pack that I am making for my map the masked colour turns purple in the texture browser (and on the 3d view in the editor when it is applied) and no longers is masked in the game.

How do I prevent this change from happening? Any ideas as to why it is happening?

[Aphex]

First, convert the texture to 256 colours.
Then you can edit the palette (different procedure for each paint prog) - edit the first colour on the palette (*index* 0, not colour 0) to be your transparent colour.
Fill in your 'transparent' bits of the texture with this colour.
Save as .bmp

[Ingenue]

To see if/be sure you are in RGB mode, goto Image --- Mode. There should be a check mark next to RGB if you are in RGB.

The problem you may be having with the Deus Ex textures is that they may be mapped to a specific palette. For example, the reason that everything in Quake II tends to be blue/greyish is that in order to make the game more efficient they used a very limited number of palettes. In theory, you can have a new palette for each individual image, but this is not necessarily the most effeicient way to do it for professional game production.

Take your Deus Ex textures into Photoshop, switch them to RGB (again, goto Image ---- Mode to do this) then switch them to Indexed color again and make your 0 position color whatever the color is in the texture.

You also have to have "masked" checked when you import a texture into UED before it will work as a masked texture. It will not show up as transparent in UED, only in-game.


To find your palette, you can go to Image ----- Color Table. This will show you the palette for a given indexed color image.

Hope this helps.

-I