Metal Texture

[Mono_Giganto]

Ok, well I'm working on a sword reskin, and I want to have a metallic effect on the blade. I've heard a lot of talk about cm_baremetal (is that right?) and I'm wondering how to use that.

[svösh]

Use an alpha channel in the texture file everything that will be the blade should by gray or black in the alpha

 

Alphas works like this

 

White solid opaque and

 

Gray tones are different degrees of transparency.

 

Black hollow or transparent

 

The easiest way to make alphas are to copy an existing channel ex: red

 

Take the copied red channel now everything that is not blade or what you want shiny select and paint white using leves is also easy hit ctrl +L and use the slider at the bottom grab the black point on the left and drag it to the right until the whites are very white and the black s are mid gray. Before saving your texture rename the copied red alpha channel to Alpha 1

 

Make a txi file for the texture name it the same as your texture.

It should have this just copy the below text to notepad save it with a manual extension of .txi NOT .txt

 

envmaptexture

CM_Baremetal

 

Stick both files in override, the texture and the txi for the shader and give it a try

If you want the blade to be like the sith armour then use a darker gray or black tone for the blade in the alpha channel only.

 

I hope this helps svösh

[Mono_Giganto]

This is my first major reskin, so I don't know exactly what an alpha channel is... lol... But I think I get it thanks.

[svösh]

All digital media use a three colour separation process called channels in Photoshop you can find these in the same pallet as the layers there are three tabs on top one is layers one is channels and one is paths. Go to the channels in a RGB document you will find 4 one is RGB the combined channels that make up your image. One is Red , one ,is Green and the last is Blue after blue some image formats support the use of alpha channels. These work in 3d apps and videogames essentially the alpha is a mask and anything masked will remain the same while anything unmasked will change. The game engine use the channels to replace a certain amount of opacity specified in black or gray tones. It replaces the unmasked data and then use the shaders on them . Ex: the cm_barmetal shader then will replace any area that has any amount of gray to black on it. If you make an intricate design on the blade example some thing a la lord or the rings type engraving you would want to still see it but have your shine as well then by using a very light gray on the alpha channel for your blade you would still get the shine but your design would still be visible. If you however painted the blade area black or dark gray on the channel all you would see is the shader and you would loose the design altogether.

 

I hope this has help to uncloud the mysteries of alpha channels a bit more for you.

 

svösh