Need help with invisable texturing

I don’t believe there’s anything quite like an 1883 class ‘A’ vertical boiler Shay. LOL
I love modeling in that late 1800’s era, btw.

Thank you very much.

I haven’t got a clue what this is called so don’t know what to look for on the forums but, what I want to do is to make a spark arrester,(screen), that is ‘see through’ without making each individual cross ‘bar’ in 3D.
Is there a tutorial on how to make a screen texture that is see through?

I hope you understand what I’m wanting to do, here.
This loco needs a spark arrester on its stack;
[img:r5n15kvk]http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/5699/shay2kc0.jpg[/img:r5n15kvk]

Thanks,

It’s called ‘Transparency’ or sometimes ‘Alpha’ or ‘Mask’

from the look it appears to be MSTS1 you are running there.

What you need is a 32 bit TGA file which is a bit like a BMP file with an alpha channel.

You need a paint program to create a screen texture and mask off the solid parts.
Save this as an uncompressed 32bit TGA file.

Use this file as the texture in the material and apply to the spark arrester.

Now Right click on the object and look for the Custom material field ‘Tx Alpha’.
For the arrester material, type in ‘Transparency’.
Other options are Solid or Translucency – this one is a bit more complex as it allow semi transparent materials.

There’s a bit more on translucency here:
[img:23yas9zz]http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic.php?f=18andt=85548[/img:23yas9zz]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic.php?f=18andt=85548">http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. … andt=85548</a><!– m –>

No, it’s Trainz 2004. I’m biding my time from MSTS1 to Trainz then hopefully, back into MSTS2.

OK, thanks, Paul. I’ll look deeper into this Transparency, Alpha, Mask thing.

Keep up the great work for MTS2. I’m really looking forward to it’s release and all the work you’re doing for it for 3DC Pro, too.

Have fun,

For Trainz, just use the TGA file as for MSTS.

If you’re just using transparency, make sure the mask contains no grey areas or Trainz may do some odd things with the drawing order of parts.

Otherwise, just export as normal. However, you will need to manually alter the .texture.txt file for the TGA file to include the line Alpha=andlt;filenameandgt; to enable the transparency.

The old version of the exporter used to do this for you, but we lost access to the transparency mask in the change to an export plugin type.

Also make sure you have the latest set of plugins from my website as there was a small fix for environment maps in the trainz exporter.

Got it, Paul. Never dawned on me that it was so simple, just using a mask. LOL

Here’s the results;

[img:3uqskk4y]http&#58;//img257&#46;imageshack&#46;us/img257/8007/sparkstn5&#46;jpg[/img:3uqskk4y]

Thanks again,

That is an amazing little loco and a wonderful model of it – great stuff.