Char skin help: Transparent

[seanfoley 0]

Hello all,

I'm a new to skinning and to this forum and I'm seeking alittle help. Is it possible to place a transparent secetion on to a character skin? I'm trying to place a head attachment (hat, helmet) on the "Jodit Haile" model but her hair sticks out.

I don't think you can, but I though I'd check with the experts.

Thanks for any help.

SF

[lexsis 0]

Im not expert but I dont think skinning can fix stuff like that., each character is a different model so they all have different shapes.

the skin still has to wrap itself around the model so no mater what skin you use it will take the shape of the model its applied to.

for example., if you had a model of a banana and you placed the skin of an apple on it, it would still look like a banana except it would have the color and texture of the apple.

[SnowFella 8]

Well, I think SeanFoley is on the right track here. It is acctually possible to effectively "remove" something on a character by just adding an alpha layer in the texture.

Take Jodit Haile for example, her hair that he's got problems with is part of her Head texture, by adding an alpha layer he can make all of her hair transparent. It will still be there on the character but it will be invisible ingame. This does create a hole in her head though but if you can mask that with an attachment (like a boonie hat or cap) it should work.

Snow

[deleyt 0]

Remember that it can have weird side-effects.

The geometry and it's tags will still be there, so everything in the game-engine will react to it accordingly.

This means that if you shoot just passed her head and you happen to hit the part of the hair that's alpha'd, she will still get hurt although it looks from the shooters viewpoint as if he's aiming past it.

[lexsis 0]

interesting, very interesting.

[SnowFella 8]

Yup, the geometry will still be there and can be hit. The whole character mesh counts as the characters body, something Tollen found out the hard way when he killed one of our SWEBAT riflemen by shooting him in the radioantenna by misstake.

One thing to keep in mind in this perticular case is that the alpha layer needs to be applied to both the regular head texture and the blink texture, if not then the hair will magicly appear when the character blinks

Snow

[seanfoley 0]

Thanks for the info and the help,

What Alpha Textures format should I use?

A1R5G5B5

A4R4G4B4

A8R8G8B8

Alpha Tested (Greater/Equal) (Reference Value:128)

Alpha Blended (Source Alpha) (Inverse Source Alpha)

I'll try a couple and see if I can get it to work.

Thanks again.

Sean

[deleyt 0]

That would be:

- 1 bitplane on Alpha (A1R5G5B5).

- Alphatested (comparisonfunction and value depends on your texture).

You can use an AlphaBlend (more then 1 bitplane) aswell but seems to me a waste of CPU time.

[seanfoley 0]

Well I can get a character's body transparent like in the "The Real Ghosts" mod, but I cannot get a head to go transparent. The characters' heads were not transparent in "The Real Ghost" mod either. I wonder if it would work with a player built model? Oh Well...........

Thanks for the help.

[SnowFella 8]

Just keep in mind that if you use the A1R5G5B5 option the textures doesn't work for MAC users, found that out when I did my Ares Shrike mod up. Somehow their version of GR can't hack just 1 bit alpha.