Alpha Mapping...

General debates and discussion about the Guild of Writers and Age creation

Alpha Mapping...

Postby JulyForToday » Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:34 am

Okay, I've got a question...

I managed to finally get environment maps, and texture layering to work a couple weeks ago. I was very excited. However, still there are things that are not quite working, or I haven't been able to do. Namely /real/ fading. Or Terrain blending (depending on what you want to call this sort of thing)

Of course you can make a fade with a texture thats a PNG with an alpha channel (figure 3)

And you can have solid textures (figure 1)

But can you fade a solid texture? Like how it looks in figure 4?

Either using a map (figure 2)

Or by using some sort of setting. If you look at Relto, on the terrain the mountain-ish texture is being used on the ground, but it fades out. How is this accomplished? The same thing with the fog. It fades out just before reaching the edge of the land, yet it doesn't seem like they use a separate mesh with a different map to achieve the effect. But I'm not sure that they are using a map, because if you had a black circle (like mine), you would have to alpha map the object however you needed for that map to have the right shape, but then that would screwup the way the normal texture was mapped. Unless Cyan can export multiple UV coordinates for an object.

And you also can have texture blending between two such solid or transparent textures. However, where one is transparent in a particular spot, it may be solid, or semi opaque on the other map.

Basically, if you tried to put an environment map on a plane with a texture that had an alpha channel (blades of grass, wrought iron banister, ect) that enviroment map will show up everywhere on the object's surface, not just on the grass or iron.

Of course that's the way it works. And that's fine. But if I really wanted to do that, I would need the use of actually transparency map.

Edit: I realized I post this in the wrong forum. Could someone move this post to the builder's section when they get the chance to? Thanks :)
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Re: Alpha Mapping...

Postby Trylon » Sun Sep 30, 2007 8:05 am

To be honest - you can't yet use alpha blending this way...
PyPRP simply has no support for alpha maps yet.
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