Transparency and alpha blending newbie

Hey Everyone,

Ok, I can't figure out how to get transparency and alpha blending going in an ofusion material in max. I have looked through all the posts, and read all of the ones that mention alpha, transparency or blending, and none of the answers made any sense to me Sorry guys I don't speak shader, I'm just a max user starting out in ogre 3d and ofusion.

So,

1) Can I use a black and white image to blend between two textures, or does it have to be a png with black and transparency. Black and white would be GREAT if at all possible (I'm rendering black and white max noise maps to texture, I'd like to use these for the blending).

2) Can I make an ofusion material in max that blends between two textures using the above image without having to manually edit a scary looking text file full of bizarre acronyms that evade my mutant psychic acronym guessing powers?

3) How about a tree billboard texture? (one texture map, one alpha map)

4) Could someone do some screenshots of the oFusion material settings for me? In previous posts about blending, everyone talks about settings that I either can't find or they are in three different places and I can't tell which one to use.

5) Even better, could someone do a 2 minute video tute? (its actually easier than doing screenshots?) If someone could, I could host it at my site for them.

I'm willing to bet there are a lot of people who would really appreciate being shown how to do the above.

Cheers,
Simon O

About your questions:

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes

I will review if the alpha blend example scene is available to CE users, if not i will post it in the Scenes section for download

In this scene you can see the material settings for blending between textures using an alpha map

cool, thanks for that

Um... what is the scenes section and where is it?

The example scene is available to CE users now, see this article for details and a link to the Scenes section (the Scenes section is located in the Artist's Center on the main site)

Enviroment Mapping using Alpha masks

Hi, thanks for posting that example file, it was good to see some actual settings that work with alpha in oFusion.

Having said that, what I am looking for specifically is whether or not ogre (and ofusion) can blend between two textures with a black and white bitmap with no alpha, not a black and transparent png which is what is in the example zip (see point one of my first post).


I use procedural noise rendered to a texture in max to create masks to blend between materials, and as far as I know render to texture can't output transparency.

Are you sure render to texture doesnt output alpha information?

If you need you can convert your images to alpha maps using GIMP or Adobe software

No I'm not sure about render to texture... and I went into photoshop yesterday and made an action to convert black/white maps to black/alpha anyway.

Unfortunately for me, I don't have a nice expensive video card (only a gforce 6200) and my tablet which I love has no shader support at all. Because of all this, I've started to move in the direction of using geometry to solve my texture blending needs. Sounds pretty stone age, but I've actually been able to figure out some pretty neat tricks, and bonus it runs on my laptops.