IN PROGRESS: Alpha Channel questions

Luke003

Hi everybody.

I have some questions about alpha maps and how to implement them.

I'm using Quixel SUITE to create a texture map for my car model. I have it generating an opacity map for the windows and light housings. In dDo legacy, I remember there was an option to save a map as an alpha channel on another map. I can't find that option in the SUITE. Am I doing something wrong here?

I'm also just having a hard time getting alpha channels to show up in my files.

• My PSD's from Quixel Suite don't appear to have them.
• Manually creating the alpha on those saved tga's and resaving them doesn't seem to have them.
• Saving that file as a png or a psd doesn't yield a file with an alpha channel either.

I know I must be doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. I'm making sure dialogue options for saving the alpha are checked. I'm double checking that there is an alpha present in Photoshop when I save. What am I missing?

Eric Chadwick

Moving this to the Quixel forum, as you're likely to get better responses here.

teddybergsman

Hi Luke003,

Thanks for your question! You are not doing anything wrong, my apologies for the confusion. What you are looking for is Calibration Profiles. This is an advanced topic for configuring completely custom export and calibration settings: http://quixel.se/usermanual/quixelsuite/doku.php?id=ddo_calibrationprofiles

I realize storing the opacity map in the alpha channel of the albedo is a fairly common requirement however, so we will make sure to extend the current calibration profiles with this support for 1.7. Meanwhile feel free to let me know which one you are using and I'll send you an updated version.

Thanks Luke,
- Teddy

Luke003

teddybergsman wrote: »

Hi Luke003,

Thanks for your question! You are not doing anything wrong, my apologies for the confusion. What you are looking for is Calibration Profiles. This is an advanced topic for configuring completely custom export and calibration settings: http://quixel.se/usermanual/quixelsuite/doku.php?id=ddo_calibrationprofiles

I realize storing the opacity map in the alpha channel of the albedo is a fairly common requirement however, so we will make sure to extend the current calibration profiles with this support for 1.7. Meanwhile feel free to let me know which one you are using and I'll send you an updated version.

Thanks Luke,
- Teddy

Thanks for the explanation.

I haven't made any modifications to the profiles, so I'm assuming it's just the default one. And I have mainly been using Toolbag 2 to view my models.

scarface

hi
just need some help storing the Opacity map into into the exported diffuse alpha channel. Basically I tried to modify the UDK calibrationprofileprofile by adding the AddAlphaMap() function (found in the UE4 profile)

case "Albedo":
            SetMapType("Diffuse");
            var map = GetMergedMap();
         
          AddAlphaMap(map, "Opacity"); 
          BlendMap(map, "AO", BlendMode.MULTIPLY);

            return map;

but the script crashes.
Would be nice to have some Calibrationprofile tutorials around.
Unfortunately I have zero experience with JavaScript:(
Or are there other ways to "reorganize" the exportchannels?

scarface

deleted the doublepost - sorry