Help needed - opacity map problems

heribertovalle

Hi everyone!

I was wondering if someone could help me with this. We're making an adventure videogame, and are starting to rig, animate and implement the previously modelled and textured 3d assets. All was moot until the game engine (which uses .x files) refused to accept the opacity maps. So, we asked around the engine's forums (www.dead-code.org) and they told us to use opacity maps that are RGBA with alpha. Fair enough. But... I got a bit of a garbled mess from 3d max. and I was under the assumption that opacity maps were done in shades of gray too. here is what happened:





Now, In the game engine forums I was actually told that it might have been something to do with the RGBA opacity map. But they just told me it was "Something" and I was just wondering if you guys who have a lot of experience with low poly and realtime models would know a suggestion.

In any case, Thanks in advance and Do have a good day!

Eric Chadwick

Can you use 32bit TGA instead of PNG?

heribertovalle

We can, but we should not. Since our engine supports only up to 16 bit maps. I'll try to use TGA, but 32 is way out of our specs. this is a very low-end pc game.

Any other ideas anyone?

Eric Chadwick

Use DXT5 instead.

heribertovalle

Do pardon me, What is DTX5? I'm afraid we're still learning this lowpoly game business. Thanks Eric.

Filbot

If I'm not mistaking. DXT5 is a compression setting for .dds textures. Have a look at the nvidia texture tools: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

heribertovalle

hmm. I think that's a little bit too advanced for the engine we're using (nevertheless I can try to see if it help us, thanks!). I'll try to change it to a .TGA transparency too to see if it works. If anyone else has an idea about how to get this to work please help us out.

Eric Chadwick

What texture formats does your engine support?

16 bit color usually means 5 bits each for red green and blue, and only 1 bit for alpha. That means just 2 colors, black and white, so you're going to get a horrible edge.

Some 16bit formats are 4 bits for each channel, so that's 16 levels of gray for the alpha.

Then you might also have the issue of Max not implementing the full PNG spec, which could lead to rendering errors. But how does the art look in your engine? If it looks crappy in Max but fine in your runtime, then no biggie.

Eric Chadwick

Oh also, see if you can bug the engine developers to support DXT. It is one of the few formats that stays compressed in memory, meaning you can use larger or more textures than if you use PNG or TGA or BMP or whatever other formats they support.