Sorry about the one liner, I was going nuts with this last night. Here's where I'm at with this.......................
In Photoshop I Create a 512 x 512, jump to the alpha layer and add some white mess.
Export to Driver 1_2.tga -> Alpha Channels box checked -> 32 bit Compress RLE box checked.
Open the file in XNView, Everything looks fine alpha's there and working.
Then I go to ZModeler Create 2 sphere's, and name them Helmet and Visor.
(Visor I leave alone....that seems to look after itself, and annoyingly is sort of transparent.)
I assign Driver 1_2.tga to the Helmet, I've tried all "blending modes" Glowing Semi-Transparency, Color Key and Testing with the <= >= Func
Switches, again I can see the transparency (Except when using color key.)
Export to car_helmet_00.gp4, and open in GP4 Builder, turn on Alpha Blending, and again I see the transparency. I go to Tools edit materials
and check the Transparency check box, then Save.
(I've noticed that when I save with GP4 builder and re-open the file in ZModeler it has reverted back to the "Unused" blending mode.)
In Slimtex I convert the TGA to TEX, I've tried All combinations of Formats and Compressions (I'm wondering if this is the step I'm failing at,
as i see the transparency in ZModeler and GP4 Builder).
All to no avail, In game no transparency ...nadda, not a thing.
Why am I doing all of this ???....well I got an idea that I might be able to have Individual Helmet Shapes for the drivers.
For example , I've noticed I can add shape's to the car_helmet_00.gp4 file with no I'll effects, other than if I don't map the shape to either
Driver1_1.tga or Driver1_2.tga the game can't find the texture, as it looks in the helmets folder, (Obviously made this way for Idividual
texture's).....but it does find the texture when I put it in the helmet/shapes folder and I can name the texture to anything.
ie, There's the Helmet Shape and Visor Shape Mapped to Driver1_1.tga and Driver1_2.tga, I add a sphere and map it to sphere.tga. If I put
sphere.tex in the helmet/hi/button folder, i get white textures in game, If i put it in helmet/shape folder it shows in game.
anyway.....
What I was hoping to experiment with was Putting 4 different Helmet shapes into the car_helmet_00.gp4 file and Mapping them to the
Driver1_1.tga and Driver1_2.tga's...then controlling the visibility of the shapes with the alpha channels in the textures.
Obviously you would need to UVW map the shapes onto a big texture split into 4 quarters, then for the individual drivers tex files you would
simply move the alpha channel to control the transparency. One quarter visible, the other 3 quarters transparent.
4 Shapes in Max
Driver1_2.tga
UVW Mapped
Alpha
Result
That's the theory, but can't get it working In game.