[lowfighter]

I experimented a bit with the broad tree but got in trouble. What I did: took a screenshot of the tree skin. Pasted in gimp, resized. The tree appears on white background. Remove the white background. Removed all colors close to white. Went to FMB, the "new" skin is there but there's white at the edges. Thought maybe I haven't removed all white shades. Went to gimp and simply painted the edges in one single green color. No joy, white is still there at the edges. Anyone knows what's the trick??? :?

Another thing, as I move away from the tree the white gets amplified somehow...

[FC]

I experimented a bit with the broad tree but got in trouble. What I did: took a screenshot of the tree skin. Pasted in gimp, resized. The tree appears on white background. Remove the white background. Removed all colors close to white. Went to FMB, the "new" skin is there but there's white at the edges. Thought maybe I haven't removed all white shades. Went to gimp and simply painted the edges in one single green color. No joy, white is still there at the edges. Anyone knows what's the trick??? :?

Another thing, as I move away from the tree the white gets amplified somehow...

Just for a experiment take skin of some other object and use it on tree to see what will happen.

FC

[lowfighter]

FC, did what you suggested, took skin of some german church, in FMB I see 2 vertical and one horisontal planes painted with the church texture. But i can't see the connection with my problem???

[FC]

FC, did what you suggested, took skin of some german church, in FMB I see 2 vertical and one horisontal planes painted with the church texture. But i can't see the connection with my problem???

But do you have white areas when you are using skin which is in original format or no?

Can you post picture of what is happening to you?

FC

[spud]

I made a random pattern tga for the palm trees. Brown on a transparent background.

Put it in game, and the transparent areas were white.

[FC]

I made a random pattern tga for the palm trees. Brown on a transparent background.

Put it in game, and the transparent areas were white.

White is shown when there is no other texture, it seems that you will have to experiment with object transparency.

Pleas, when you have problem, post a picture if possible, it's easier to help in that case.

FC

[lowfighter]

FC, here's a shot showing the thing. The way the white increases with distance. The tree to the left is just the default one for comparison. The "new" tree has more holes in it because I tried to remove the white damit. If I came even closer to the first "new" tree the white you see in pic vanished almost completely.

[spud]

I made a random pattern tga for the palm trees. Brown on a transparent background.

Put it in game, and the transparent areas were white.

White is shown when there is no other texture, it seems that you will have to experiment with object transparency.

Pleas, when you have problem, post a picture if possible, it's easier to help in that case.

FC

Is transparency done with a transparent tga, or is there a reserved color for transparency?

I was trying to get most of the palm fronds to go transparent.

[Guest]

I made a random pattern tga for the palm trees. Brown on a transparent background.

Put it in game, and the transparent areas were white.

White is shown when there is no other texture, it seems that you will have to experiment with object transparency.

Pleas, when you have problem, post a picture if possible, it's easier to help in that case.

FC

Is transparency done with a transparent tga, or is there a reserved color for transparency?

I was trying to get most of the palm fronds to go transparent.

By selecting alpha channel on 32 bit tga, nothing with color (as far as I know) and in Photoshop opacity for transparent parts/alpha channel must be set to 100% if we want IL2 to sees it properly (or not sees it).

So in theory you can have whole 3D object make transparent with making its texture all in alpha channel, but I think that edges will be visible.

Here is example, what is white is alpha channel and must be hand select and saved in Photoshop as 32 bit tga.

[lowfighter]

Avala, if possible could you try this with the broad tree(the one in my screenshot)? I'm really a noob about image processing so maybe if you make it work and then come with an idiot's guide for me I'd be very greatful

[Guest]

Avala, if possible could you try this with the broad tree(the one in my screenshot)? I'm really a noob about image processing so maybe if you make it work and then come with an idiot's guide for me I'd be very greatful

I could try, but I don’t understand what your goal with changing that tree is? If you can tell me that.

In the meanwhile maybe the key for that white (which is alpha channel) lies in .mat file for that tree. Here it is: base.mat from the folder: 3DO\Tree\Broad1

[ClassInfo]
ClassName TMaterial
[General]
tfDoubleSide 0
tfShouldSort 0
tfDropShadow 0
tfGameTimer 1
[LightParams]
Ambient 1.0
Diffuse 1.0
Specular 0
SpecularPow 0
Shine 0.0
[Layer0]
TextureName tree2x2.tga
PaletteName
Frame 0.0
VisibleDistanceNear 0.0
VisibleDistanceFar 10000.0
TextureCoordScale 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
ColorScale 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
AlphaTestVal 0.5
tfWrapX 1
tfWrapY 1
tfMinLinear 1
tfMagLinear 1
tfMipMap 1
tfBlend 0
tfBlendAdd 0
tfTestA 0
tfTestZ 1
tfUpDateClear 0
tfModulate 1
tfNoTexture 0
tfAnimatePalette 0
tfAnimateSkippedFrames 0


I think that that in red is what you want to play with. By the way you can make whole tree invisible or like ghostly seting values in yelows on „1“ :mrgreen:

I am not much of a expert, but i think that much can be done with that .mat files

[lowfighter]

Avala thanks! What i want is changing the tree, perhaps making it look autumn-like etc. Have a bunch of them with different colors would improve scenery clearly.


I played with alphatestval and if set to 0.7 or higher the white disappears! But the tree has bad behaviour at large distances it shrinks too much and disappears faster than the default one. When I pasted the tga in gimp I removed the white background around the tree. Perhaps I should try tomorrow NOT to do that and see what happens with alphatestval set to 0.7 or something. If I didn't remove the white background and had alphatestvalue 0.5 then I had white around the tree in FMB in the three perpendicular planes (rectangle white around the tree).

[lowfighter]

So I went to a "normal" object, namely the german barrack in norway group, which has no transparent parts. With such an object no need to fiddle with the skin background. Just modify the "active" colors in the image . However if I want to work on the damaged object skin (which most often has holes etc) then again I'd stumble on the transparency problem encountered with trees. Anyway, this is cool, because within a ridiculously small amount of time you can get a different variant of the object.

[lowfighter]

Ok, I finally managed to have a functional "new" treeline. It's slightly darker and a bit more visible at larger distances (although the visibility distance doesn't differ from the one of the default treeline). It behaves ok. alphatestval set to 0.7. Myproblem was for a while that although it looked good at smaller distances, at larger distances it was looking weird. My mistake was the following:
There are 3 skins for the treeline, tree0.tga, tree1.tga, tree2.tga. I modified the tree0 but then I just scaled it down to get tree1 and tree2 tgas. That was an error since the 3 skins look quite different. So then I took shots of tree1 and tree2, pasted in gimps and modified them to fit with tree0.
I think that we can have smaller trees produced from the ones we have now too, maybe even bush.

[spud]

I think the row of 4 trees should be darker, period. I'd love a mod that would just darken it to make it more visible. Needn't be a new object, I think the existing one looks terrible.