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Graphic Artistry: Transparent Textures


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GA_Trans_Title.png

What are they?

Transparent textures are textures that are transparent or have parts that are transparent. What I mean by that is, parts of the texture have basically have their opacity dropped so parts of the texture can be partially seen through or completely removed.

This effect is used on things like Glass Windows or Glass Bottles, it allows you to have a see-through effect so you can see the liquid inside. This effect isn't limited to glass though, you can use it on any texture that requires parts to be hidden or partially see-through.

A good example if this is, say you have a leaf texture, you have a nice leaf in the center but have a background behind it showing grass or other plants. Now you want to get rid of the background and leave just the nice leaf showing on your plant. An easy way to go about this is to add transparency to the leaf texture.

What do they look like?

This is our texture without any transparency:

GA_Trans_01.jpg

Looks odd doesn't it?, Well that's because the background of the texture isn't being removed, so it's showing along with the flowers.

Here is the texture with transparency:

GA_Trans_02.jpg

Looks nice doesn't it?, Well that's because the background is being removed by the Alpha channel so only the flowers are showing.

And this is what's making things transparent:

GA_Trans_03.jpg

This is called an Alpha channel, or an Alpha mask. What this does is tells the game that you want certain areas to show and others not. To do this you paint the areas you want to show pure white, the other areas you will paint either varying shades of grey for different levels of transparency or completely black or full transparency.

How do I make them?

Making them isn't as hard as you might think, I'll use a leaf as an example to show you how it's done. So we have a leaf texture in our 2D application of choice, as you can see it has a black background we don't want to show.

GA_Trans_04.jpg

So what we need to do is create a Alpha mask so we can get rid of it. What we do now is make a new layer just above our leaf, then take our Wand tool, click the Background layer and click outside of the leaf so all of the background is selected.

GA_Trans_05.jpg

Next we click on our newly created layer (I named mine Alpha Mask), fill it in with the black colour, now we invert our select so the leaf has a border around it and fill it with white.

GA_Trans_06.jpg

This will be our alpha channel, so select the whole layer and copy it, now go into the Channels Tab, create a layer (It'll be called Alpha1) and paste our Alpha Mask into it.

GA_Trans_07.jpg

We'll now select the RGB layer at the top then go back into our layers tab, we can now hide the Alpha Mask layer as it won't be used. Once done we'll save the texture as a DDS file (Of course) with a compression setting of DXT5, this way we'll get a nicely saved Alpha channel.

After doing this we'll need to add an NiAlphaProperty to the NIF we're using so it tells the game to use the Alpha channel we just saved. To show this I'll be using the floramountainflower01blue.nif.

Here we have the NIF, you can see it's not showing the Alpha channel properly, so we need to make a tweak to it:

GA_Trans_08.jpg

Right-Click the Node for our model and select Node>Attach Property>NiAlphaProperty

GA_Trans_09.jpg

This will add the new property to our block list but won't connect things up for us, so what we'll do next is connect it up. With our node still selected we'll press F3 to bring up the Block Details pane, we'll scroll down the list until we find Properties, use the arrow to show the list and in the bottom slot we'll put in the number for our Alpha Property, which for this is 6. At the top of the list you'll see two green arrows, Right click them and select Array>Update.

GA_Trans_10.jpg

And that's it, our NIF will now show our transparency :dance:

GA_Trans_11.jpg

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