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[Solved]Problem with Alpha textures on Mesh


Katherineluv23
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Hi all

 

I'm working on a decorative bird statue. I have textured the feathers using a .tga file for transparency that i made in photoshop. It looks all nice and good in Maya but when i try to upload it to secondlife, the parts are the supposed to be invisible turn black, I've tried changing the texture to .png, but it just turn white instead of black, Any help ? i'm kind of new to this. I'm using Maya 2016.

 

Preview of the feather in Maya: n5WGVvW.jpg

 

But while previewing before uploading, the rectangular parts that should be transparent turn black and are visible in the preview window: ZS68LvR.jpg

Edited by Katherineluv23
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I doubt that the preview window will display transparency. Try uploading the texture and see what happens in-world. If you are worried about the 10 L$ upload fee for the texture, try the beta grid.

Edited by arton Rotaru
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28 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

If you are worried about the 10 L$ upload fee for the texture, try the beta grid.

Or use the Local Textures option.  It's easier and also free.  I suspect that you are going to discover that you saved the texture as a 24-bit (RGB) file rather than a 32-bit (RGBA) file in Photoshop, so your alpha channel was never saved.

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13 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

I doubt that the preview window will display transparency. Try uploading the texture and see what happens in-world. If you are worried about the 10 L$ upload fee for the texture, try the beta grid.

No idea what the beta grid is, but you were right, the transparency works in game but just not in the preview window, this whole time i thought i've been doing something wrong but it was just the preview window limitation. I uploaded it now, and it looks as good as in Maya, Thanks :)

13 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Or use the Local Textures option.  It's easier and also free.  I suspect that you are going to discover that you saved the texture as a 24-bit (RGB) file rather than a 32-bit (RGBA) file in Photoshop, so your alpha channel was never saved.

Thanks for this tip, i didn't know i could use .TGA in secondlife, but after testing it on a simple yellow cude, i could see the transparency working nicely. After trying this, i uploaded it anyway and it worked even with black bars on the preview window, it looks normal in game

Edited by Katherineluv23
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6 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Local textures are great for testing.
In this case though, I'd say it's a safe bet to upload the mesh with the texture applied, because, if the texture wouldn't have working alpha, it won't work in Maya either.

 

A logical assumption, but that isn't always the case with Maya.  Maya materials can utilize a second texture for transparency, as is the case when using the Transfer Maps feature to bake texture information from a high poly model to a low poly "game ready" model. Since it doesn't include transparency in the Diffuse map, you have to bake a separate Alpha map which Maya then automatically attaches as an input for the transparency channels of the new shader.  When viewing the resulting shader in Maya the transparency appears as normal, even though the Diffuse texture is only 24-bit and the alpha is being handled by a completely separate texture, so in order to upload it to SL you'd need to manually composite the RGB channels with the alpha channel in Photoshop first.  I find it's usually a good idea to open up your textures in Photoshop before uploading to SL and checking your alpha channel in there.

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16 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

but that isn't always the case with Maya.

That's certainly true. It isn't always the case in 3ds Max either. Though, " I have textured the feathers using a .tga file for transparency that i made in photoshop" red to me more like a texture with an alpha channel, rather than a diffuse and an additional opacity map. It was still an assumption indeed. :SwingingFriends:

Edited by arton Rotaru
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1 hour ago, Katherineluv23 said:

i didn't know i could use .TGA in secondlife, but after testing it on a simple yellow cude, i could see the transparency working nicely.

You may upload TGA, PNG, BMP, or JPG textures.  All are converted on arrival to JPG2000 and are automatically redimensioned to the closest (next lowest) power of two dimensions, so that the final image in SL has dimensions of 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1024 pixels.  You cannot upload textures with dimensions larger than 1024 pixels, and it is always smarter to do any redimensioning yourself before uploading than to trust the uploader to do it correctly.  JPG  and BMP files have no 32-bit option, hence no alpha channel but can be useful for displaying snapshots and simple signs.  Opinions are split about whether it's "better" to use TGA or PNG files, but in point of fact there are few reasons to prefer one over the other.  I like TGA myself because I find it easier to manage transparency that is developed by combining several layers in the original PSD file, but that's purely a personal preference. 

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12 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's certainly true. It isn't always the case in 3ds Max either. Though, " I have textured the feathers using a .tga file for transparency that i made in photoshop" red to me more like a texture with an alpha channel, rather than a diffuse and an additional opacity map. It was still an assumption indeed. :SwingingFriends:

Yes my comment wasn't really relevant to the OPs problem, but I thought it worth mentioning in case anyone read it and thought it safe to assume that what you see in Maya is what you'll get in SL. :)

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