Masks have no visible effect

Rokit

Hey guys, I'm having a problem with masks. They don't seem to have any effect. Basically, I want my weapon to have that cool blinn shader effect that Anti-Mage's weapon has. The problem is I have translated all of Anti-Mage's weapon masks to my own weapon and it still looks flat as a board, like a lambert shader or something. I didn't see it reflect any light at all. I also tried making my mask 2 look like Phantom Assassin's. No effect. I rename the file every time I import so I know it's not that. I'm just not sure what the problem is. I mean my mask 2 literally went from this:



to this:



and I saw not a damn bit of difference.

If anyone knows what the problem could be please tell me, cause I'm out of ideas.

belkun

Make sure that you have an alpha channel on both masks and they have at least one white pixel. Just paint a 100% white circle outside of an UV island. Also make sure you're saving them as 32bit TGA.

Rokit

Yeah, they are 32bit tga. I will try the white circle thing.

Rokit

Well, I tried it, but it didn't work. I even tried white dots in every channel if the default color was black, and black dots if the default was white.

belkun

That is pretty weird. Are you sure that the normals are working and the green channel is inverted? If the diffuse, normal and masks are fine, there may be something with your mesh.

Rokit

I decided to just make them all black except for the alpha on mask 2 which should be white if not used. After I did that I noticed my normals were showing up a lot better. So then I just decided to replace mask 2 with the one I had and actually noticed a huge difference. Apparently, copying and pasting the values from Anti Mage wasn't doing the trick although I have no idea why since it's just shader information. I would assume they would at least look similar, but they didn't. I'm sure if I play around with it some more I'll arrive at something I like. Thanks for the help, belkun.

Rokit

Figured out what the problem was. Even though I was saving the TGAs as 32bit, the alpha channel wasn't saving because I had other channels that were holding my saved selections...Basically I had Red, Green, Blue, Alpha 1, Blade, Handle, etc, etc, lol. Wow. Took me all day to figure that out.