Seraphim Texturing Help

[Dudekahedron]

Hi FAF,
What's the deal with Seraphim SpecTeam texture and how does one make them? I've been using paint.net and all it picks up on are faint wisps of less than total alpha, and do one thing wrong and its glowing like crazy or totally black!?
SEND HALP PLZ

[nine2]

I haven't looked but sounds like there will be another channel in the image you need to look at that controls alpha. Need to look at the RBGA channels... not sure Paint.Net is going to cut it. If you post an original image i can look

[Dudekahedron]

Hi Anihilnine, thanks for taking a look
http://www.filehosting.org/file/details ... ecTeam.dds
That's taken from the seraphim t4 assault bot, though all the specteams from the seraphim that I've looked at are completely transparent on alpha (at least as presented by gimp and paint.net). The textures can be seen though with a wand tool set to really low tolerance; or from sliding a color selector across it - though the alpha is always 0!

However, the texture can be seen when fed into blender:

This won't work in supcom's texturing system though.

[vongratz]

Compression must to be DXT5 in albedo.dds and specteam.dds
Yes Alpha is zero in both. Ive checked Supcomm originals and 3d party ones.
Specteam is right. Ive checked in Photoshop from your file in .dds

[nine2]

Yeah so I guess supcom doesn't use the alpha channel of the file. It would use the R channel as something else... like the R channel might set how much stuff glows, etc.

[Dudekahedron]

Hmm. Thanks guys, I'll have to play around with the different channels then. It didn't occur to me that it was using them sort of independently.

Edit: Forgot to add, i was also making my albedo textures improperly. The metal-sheen of the seraphim comes from the albedo file, and requires a background alpha of somewhere below 10 (of 255).
I say background, because the symbols should be close to completely visible, and I think no-transparency in albedo is used for the team color!

For the background stuff in albedo.dds, at alpha of 0 its totally black. At alpha of 255 its completely the team color. At alpha of 15 it comes off white ish, and from 15-45 it becomes more and more the team color.

Hopefully this stuff helps others make seraphim units too. The UEF and Cybran shadings make total sense and are easy to use. Aeon shading is like a mix with the seraphim stuff.

[Dudekahedron]

For lonely seraphim-texture master wannabes;
Don't use paint.net, it doesn't use the right version of DXT5 and/or doesn't handle alpha separately from the other color channels. Whatever.
Also disregard my solution above, it works on some maps all depending on lighting, but there's a better way I think.

Use Gimp, isolate the seraphim pattern in one layer (however you want, I used paint.net addons), and then in another use your 'background' texture and change it's opacity to 0. For blender bakers, the background texture will just be the very dark stripey albedo bake that blender poops out. Then merge the layers, and export it using the BC3/DXT5 compression method.

[Krapougnak]

You could always try to save in DTX3 in Paint.net ?

[Dudekahedron]

Sorry, delayed reply, I'll give DTX3 a shot for my next Seraphim unit I suppose. I appear to have a good method right now, but added simplicity couldn't hurt.

[Exotic_Retard]

really you want to be using a plugin for photoshop:
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-tex ... -photoshop

i dont think saving as anything except dxt5 is a great idea tbh but dunno.