How to make something transparent

[Angerfist]

Im trying to skin Garret, as no one has ever skinned him and it's my favo model.

So im trying to get rid of those crappy spikes, but how do i get this to work ?

K thnx

 

[Cortez]

Select the spikes in your image editing program, invert the selection, then save the selected area as an alpha channel. Save the texture in TGA (Targa) format. I think TIF will work as well, but don't quote me on it.

Import the texture, the spikes will be gone.

You may want to leave those spikes there, though, Angerfist. Because if you remove them, your new character will have big holes in his skull:



Caveat: when you make part of the mesh invisible, that part shows up when the character is 'highlighted'. For example, I once made Frostbite's 'armor hood' invisible, but when I picked up the double damage powerup his body flashed with the purple energy, and you could see the energy crackling around the invisible part of the armor, though the armor itself remained invisible.

 

[Angerfist]

Thanks, alot!

It's probebly going to look like ur skins, not as good though.

Ill pimp some soon

Caveat: when you make part of the mesh invisible, that part shows up when the character is 'highlighted'. For example, I once made Frostbite's 'armor hood' invisible, but when I picked up the double damage powerup his body flashed with the purple energy, and you could see the energy crackling around the invisible part of the armor, though the armor itself remained invisible.

yah i noticed it when i was playing in 3d person and picked up the shield.
Thnx anyway

 

[daloonie]

Cortez I must correct you now you need to set the texture property 'masked' to be true else this won't have any effect at all.

Else you can use .dds DirectDrawSurfaces as well when you save them with an alpha channel.

 

[Cortez]

Cortez I must correct you now you need to set the texture property 'masked' to be true else this won't have any effect at all.

Else you can use .dds DirectDrawSurfaces as well when you save them with an alpha channel.

As the screenshot I posted above shows, I use UPaint. I don't need to set the texture properties, Upaint converts the skin to DDS with the trans info intact when it exports the package to UT.

The only thing I ever use UnrealEd for when skinning is to change the portrait and the texture LODset, which, for some stupid reason, UPaint sets to "World" instead of "Playerskin" and "Interface".

 

[daloonie]

Well I never use UPaint(that's why I didn't know that.) I always use UnrealED I think you get more control of texturepackages/ textures than in UPaint and all settings are changeable plus it's easy to see your skin in semi action with the Animations menu. Then with all that I can live with that it has a slower startup than UPaint.
Does UPaint even have the ability to make shaders, cubemaps, combiners and so on? I use them from time to time on my skins and it's really easy to do that in UnrealED

I never use UPaint so I don't have that problem.

I use nVIDIA's DirectDrawSurface plugin for Photoshop to convert my textures from .psd to .dds which gives you alot of options you can use like DXT1, 3 and 5 compression and with or without alpha channel and alot more.

I really recommend UnrealED for anyone because of my experience with it but if you don't have 1GB RAM like me it's not that good as it eats a whole bunch of RAM just to start up.

 

[Mr.Wigglez]

if it has a hole in his head will look like he got a head shot on him lol.

 

[Cortez]

Does UPaint even have the ability to make shaders, cubemaps, combiners and so on?

No, it doesn't. It also doesn't create animated textures. Upaint's great as a basic tool for skinning, you get a nice 3d view, no animations, though. It creates the UTX file and writes a basic INT that'll make the character work in UT. And it's REAL easy to use.

I'm just getting into skinning, I created my Cortez pack and skinned some Lawdogs characters, but I haven't gotten into the more advanced stuff like the shaders and cubemaps. I thought the shiny sunglasses on the Agent Smith model was pretty sweet, so I'll eventually get around to learning that stuff.

 

[daloonie]

It's good to know and easy to create and the outcome is mostly awesome when applied correctly so I can't agree more in you should begin to learn it thumbs up from here