Transparent texture?

[Karall]

Alright, so I want to make a plant right?
Pretty simple, just make two square planes in a cross and apply a texture. Altho for it not to look weird, were theres nothing on the texture I want it to be transparent. So for example i have some leaves on a white background. How would i make that white transparent? I use Darkplaces.

[ceriux]

check out external tga support and how to use alpha channels

[frag.machine]

In unmodified Quake/GlQuake engines, there's no support to transparent colors in .mdl. Besides the usual Darkplaces/FTE indications, the RMQ engine (developed and maintained by mh) does support transparency to .bsp models (not sure about .mdl though, better to ask mh directly), and I remember the Kurok engine having this exactly to implement vegetation (a simple engine change was required and there's a thread where mh showed how to do that - use the forum search if you want to get your hands dirty in engine coding ).

If you're not targeting a modified engine, it's possible to emulate what you want with 2 entities and 2 sprites (sprites do support color index 255 as transparency). Basically, spawn both entities in the same coordinates but having a 90 degrees offset in the .angles_y and here is your plant/bush.

[mh]

There hasn't been a requirement for having this on MDLs in RMQ yet so it doesn't support it. I'd personally run with the two sprites idea if only for one drawback - sprites are always drawn fullbright.

I guess you could hack it with MDLs by setting the entity alpha to something like 0.999 and using a TGA with an alpha channel as the skin. This may even work with the native 8-bit texture; Nehahra does this for fences/grills/grates on brush models and it works - kinda - fine. I haven't personally tested this for MDLs though so I don't know how robust it would be, and I wouldn't encourage hacks of this nature (they normally either come back to bite you or conflict with something else).

[Spike]

[leileilol]

[Madfox]

I used the transparant effect by transporting the model to a sprite.
There's a good sprite-editor from FricaC that can obtain the effect by using one of Quake's colours as alpha chanel,while importing small bmp.
It's a bit in the way like the grenade explosion, which also makes use of the transparant effect.

Quake uses the Pal Colour:255 R:159 G:091 B:083 for transparant.
So when you use this as your surrounding colour it will be transparant. Don't forget to use 2bit black/white shaders for alfa.

Bad point is the plant will always turn like in doom, but when you make it round enough, like a palmtree it won't be that disturbing.

fimg_v can be found at the Quakaddicted site/tools
http://www.quaddicted.com/tools/

Here's an example of the voreball as sprite, the red surrounding won't appear in Quake.

[frag.machine]

Actually when I suggested to use sprites I was thinking about oriented sprites (the kind that doesn't always face you). It's just a flag you set when creating sprites with ADQuedit, I think it's possible to do the same with Fimg.

[leileilol]

but sprites aren't lit!

Well, if you're using darkplaces, stick a ! beginning in the filename then it'll be lit

Personally I don't like using oriented sprites for objects because you'd require more entities to simulate more volume, AND the sprites do not have visible backfaces

also, glquake (and everything after) broke its sprite rendering for the various different modes. mh needs to like write a tut to fix the exotic sprite modes in GL or something. VP Parallel Oriented is very cute to make sprite effects with (rotating smoke anybody?)

[frag.machine]

[goldenboy]

[mh]

[frag.machine]