AD Maya 2011 - .tga issue.

DrunkShaman

Greetings Polycounters;

After five hours of banging my head with hair modeling I finally got to the point where I am to use alphas for the hair texturing. The way I've learned is that you paint hair in photoshop, and create layer for alpha in the alpha channel to work on it. You need to save it as tga so when you plug the diffuse it should plug the alpha to surface shader automatically.

When I did that; It turned out to be like this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7401935/TGA_Issue_SS1.jpg

Even in this situation the texture map doesnt seem to work nor does the alpha.

Any help will be really appreciated.

DrunkShaman

really?

JackyBoy

Are you saving it as 32bit tga? What does the map look like? What do your UVs look like? Wht engine are you using?

throttlekitty

I think you need to go into high quality lighting mode to view the texture at its proper resolution when using a surface shader, or change the Textured Channel attribute.

I've never understood this node. Playing with it now, I either get low res + transparency or normal res and no transparency in my viewport.

DrunkShaman

it saves as 32 bit by default, and i am just using maya for now. I've been testing things out to find a good flow for texturing so I wont have to bother with it when I am working on the actual model. High Quality Rendering is enabled as well.

DrunkShaman

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7401935/TGA_Issue_SS2.jpg


if this is any help.

This is TGA 32bit file with alpha channel active in photoshop

Will it work if I use TIFFs or JPEGs instead?

I either get low res + transparency or normal res and no transparency in my viewport.

If you mean "poly transparency sort" is enabled? Yes I tried that and it didnt work. In low quality view port, it works fine but alphas dont work in it. You can only preview them in the high quality.

throttlekitty

Are you using the RGB colors for transparency in that last image? It looks like it's working otherwise.

From the same texture, you should attach outTransparency from the same texture node to transparency of the shader node. (by default if the tga has alpha as you mention earlier.)


this is in the standard viewport.
And do you need to have that surface shader in the chain? If not, get rid of it.

DrunkShaman

I've done that.

I've also done passing the out trans to trans from surface shader.

I've also done passing the 2d texture plane and connecting them to the same material.

Nothing works.

Best I could do is make the entire mesh transparent. =\

xillyriax

hey Nitewalkr, can you post the Maya file with the texture?

DrunkShaman

I spoke to few people on Polycount University and they say that Maya always have problems previewing renders for alphas and what not. They may work sometimes but they maynot the rest of the times. It is best to preview the models in game editors / engines or toolbags. This person had problems with his model when he imported in to 3ds max and wanted to take a render of it.

@Xillyriax: Just the hair mesh or the entire model?

EDIT: I dont want anyone to do my work for me, I wanted to know how it is done so I can understand it and have less hard time dealing with it when I go back to the actual project. The other way of doing it is in maya and not in photoshop. I'll link the hair mesh that I am testing with and the texture file that I am using in a bit.

This problem is only happening with hair. =\

DrunkShaman

Disregard that; I finally found a fix for it. I saved a texture file separately and alpha separately and plugged them in to the material and it worked!!

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7401935/TGA_Issue_fix%27t.jpg

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7401935/Rend_Ps1.jpg