Transparency Problem

[harIII]

I'm trying to take a rakghoul and do something nifty with it. I want the entire body to be rather transparent so that it looks more like a ghost than a creature. However when I do I see the whiteness of the model rather than seeing through it. How can I make the rakghoul transparent?

[Warlord664]

Yeah, the rakghoul model is broken, at least for TSL anyway. No matter what you do to it, he stays solid. and even if you just do the Eraser on him he turns solid black in game. I don't know any way around it unless you can play with the effects and filters enough to make him transparent (Which I don't think will work.) I messed with it on gimp for about an hour or two, couldn't get anything near to transpearent.

 

Maybe somebody else knows a way around it.

[Capibara]

Does the texture have an alpha channel? maybe it can be made transparent in-game by way of that? (worked for a lot of robe mods out there, cm_baremetal and all, heh).

[harIII]

How would I do something like that capibara?

[Capibara]

Well, i admit i know very little of k/tsl modding, but i've seen a lot of re-skin mods that suffer from having the skin (and thus the creature wearing it) turn transparent in-game, as far as i know the cause is that the re-skin uses an alpha channel that wasn't in the original skin texture in order to give it metallic shine (mostly done to robe re-skins, but mandalorians in TSL also), but apparently if the texture does not allow for a cm_baremetal alpha channel in (i think) the appearance 2da file then it will definitely have transparent sections in-game (those with the alpha channel).

 

Hmm, that was a bit unclear perhaps, hope you get what i meant.

[harIII]

How would I go about allowing the texture to have a cm_baremetal alpha channel?

[Capibara]

No, just the opposite. Try this; extract and open the rakghoul texture you want to use on photoshop, check if it has an alpha channel:

 

- if it doesn't, give it one and make it a uniform dark gray, the darker it is, the more transparent those areas will be in-game (or metallic shinny if cm_baremetal is allowed)

 

- if it has one (which is posible, maybe to give it that wet, slimmy shine the rakghouls have), just erase it, replace it with a uniform dark gray as above, afterwards write "cm_baremetal" (no quotation marks) on a note pad or word pad text file, then rename it to file extension .txi and drop it on the override along with the texture with the edited alpha channel.

 

Then test it to see if it works/does the trick.

[Darth DeadMan]

- if it has one (which is posible, maybe to give it that wet, slimmy shine the rakghouls have), just erase it, replace it with a uniform dark gray as above, afterwards write "cm_baremetal" (no quotation marks) on a note pad or word pad text file, then rename it to file extension .txi and drop it on the override along with the texture with the edited alpha channel.

That's not exactly right. To make texture transparent, you don't need cm_baremetal OR ANY OTHER envmaptexture in the *.txi. In most cases you don't need *.txi at all, or you may need to make a blank *.txi.

Also, you'll need to check appearance.2da. Look for the envmap column for your appearance. If it's value is DEFAULT - everything is OK, if not - change it to default and it sould work fine.

 

EDIT: just checked TSL rakghoul texture.

You'll need to edit alpha-channel like Capibara said, and *.txi file should look like this:

 

bumpmaptexture C_Rakghoul01b

 

Remember, that *.txi file name must be exactly like the name of the texture.

[harIII]

Okay, I made the edits and I'm still no where. The texture is still solid. There is indeed an alpha channel and there is only one line in the txi which says bumpmaptexture C_Rakghoul01b. I believe the problem is with the txi file, what exactly should it look like if I simply wanted to see right through the rakghoul?

[Darth DeadMan]

Just tried this myself, and it looks like the bumpmap is making the texture solid even if it have alpha channel and no envmap in txi. So, we need to remove them. Try the following txi (it worked for me):

bumpmaptexture

 

Just this 1 line and nothing else. No value for the function will remove bumpmap from model and it should allow you to see through the model.

[harIII]

Okay finally, thank you so much guys. I works and the rakghouls look great.