Transparancy?

two_larsens

Hello,

I have messed around with trying to find where alpha maps are stored within the textures, but can't for the life of me find the documentation. I am thinking I am not Googling the right question since Valve uses different names for the SDK materials. I hate to ask here, when it is something like this. I know spec is in the Diffuse alpha, which means the alpha goes somewhere else, but I believe that Phong masks goes in the Normal alpha.

Secondly, what are the settings then for transparency to take effect?

Thirdly, if only part of an object is transparent, does it need to be exported as a separate object?

Also, now that there's the Beta importer, does it mean that nothing needs changed within the VTF file anymore - with NotePad ++?

For metallic or slightly metallic surfaces, does one have to use a cube map, or can it be from lighting only as well?

I have a million other questions, but don't want to swamp this.

Thanks for any help!

H

circle of friends

You can see where everything goes when you load up the import tool inside Tf2. Where you assign a material, you can input a diffuse, a normal, a phong mask etc. There are additional settings in there though.

for me, the alpha map of the diffuse texture is my paintables mask and the alpha map of my normal map is the specular. There is a checkbox to make it use the normal map's alpha channel as a specular map (unless this has changed..) and if you click paintable it should default to using the alpha channel of your diffuse.

As for transparency, you can use the alpha channel of your diffuse for that instead of paintable, there's a checkbox by the paintable options for alpha/additive etc. I believe this uses the paintable mask (alpha channel on diffuse unless you set it to use something else).

The new importer means all you need to add in now is SMD's and TGA's. Nothing else. If you want to make an item that can replace an older item and release it to the modding community you will still need to use older programs, but if this is purely for the workshop, then the importer will work fine.

The only thing I use notepad for now is for my custom QC file scripts, like jiggle bone values etc, but this isn't actually exported anywhere, it's just for me to copy from and paste in to the importer's QC script file.

For metallic you can use a cube map, that's inside the material files, but frankly unless it's super shiny you can just get away with a specular map and different phong values. You can give anything metallic in your model a different material id and give that material id different phong values.

Feel free to swamp me with other questions

two_larsens

Thanks, circle of friends. I sat and worked on this for quite a while, not really being sure I was making headway or making it worse. There is so much out-of-date information that can sound current, and really not that much good information out there - made by people who know what they talk about. So, just to make sure: if the alpha channel is checked off to be used as something other than transparency, then you can't have both, then? I know I clicked something in the VTF1 Edit that made everything semi-transparent, even though I didn't have an alpha for that.

This may be something with the renderer itself, but I had a hard time getting the spec map to allow the object to be shiny. I am not sure how high the phong values can go either - what is really high - too high, and such, since it isn't a slider.

Anyway, I guess it's going forward. I would like to think I more than know what I am doing in the 3D world, but Valve's world is rather new to me. I got my first TF2 item in there - with three LoDs, and is starting to look ok.

Thank you.

http://www.henriks3dworld.com/

H

circle of friends

Hi two_larsens sorry I forgot to check out this forum for a while. I'm not an expert on TF2 item submissions but I've submitted a couple of items and have had one accepted so I can give you general advice and technical knowhow.

You pretty much don't need to use anything other than the TF2 executable and HLMV.exe (located in tf/bin) to take a screengrab of your item to use as an icon.

The phong values are quite difficult to work out, someone here will probably know a lot more than me, but try putting them up a lot and see what happens. The top phong value (from memory) changes the highlight size for instance.

You can set the alpha channel in either your normal or your diffuse to be your specular. There's a tickbox to say which one. Bear in mind that if you want to use a paintable layer, that needs to go in an alpha channel too. Emmissive can be a separate texture.

Here's my diffuse and normal map for my Stormin' Norman demoman hat

http://mattisaac.co.uk/blog_images/normanhelm_normal.tga
http://mattisaac.co.uk/blog_images/normanhelm_diffuse.tga

Note that the diffuse is greyscale. This is because luckily it's either metal or paintable so all the colour is taken from the paintable section. The specular is in the normal map's alpha channel.

Hope this helps and sorry its about 10 years too late

two_larsens

Thank you, cof. Perhaps you'll read this 10 years later I'll take another look at it. In the meantime I had gotten back to Dota 2 item creation, but would really like to try my luck in TF2. So back on the horse, I guess, and thanks.

One side question: do items still get accepted on a regular basis on TF2? The reason I ask is that when looking under Accepted Items, it is still the same ones as were accepted months ago, but perhaps I'm wrong? I hope not

H

circle of friends

Generally what happens these days is that like 30 items get accepted at once and go in a big update like the summer cooler update or halloween update.