Toning Down Glows

[King Class Scout]

One thing Kirk never covered in his glow tutorials (that I could find) is how you guys adjust the transparency of your alpha channels to dim your glows down.  When i retune glows for myself, 95% of ships have every single glow reveal itself to be nearly transparent (and, thus in game, very low in the brightness quotient).  i want to see if I can find an equivelant in my own programs.

[genty]

Transparency? The alpha channels should be black and white, the lighter the colour the brighter the glow. Are you using Photoshop 7? That had a problem where the alpha channels were treated as transparencies. If you are adobe released a fixed plugin which treats alpha channels as they should be.
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=1544

[Zephram]

I know in certain games, the alpha channel is used for transparencies and not glows, but from what I have read on these forums these past few days, the apha channel is used for glows

[King Class Scout]

i use PAINTshop.  the last Photoshop i used (given to me by my ex) turned out to have a virus with it!  when I bring up the Alpha channels (See kirk's glow tutorials for my specific version) in mask mode, glow sections are actually at least 75% transparent.  since this is the ONLY art program i have (who wants to fork out 500 bucks for Photoshop?!), i use it.  i'll have to get a couple screencaps and show yuns.

from what I can tell, the masks work in reverse.  the parts labeled as "glows" let light through the parts that glow.  one of the goof ships still available from BCfiles has a gigantic goof, where someone added a blank alpha channel, lighting up the entire secondary hull (and thus generating "christmas tree" jokes).  when this person corrected the ship, he ended up deleting all the glows through the Hardpoint .  I tested this by putting the second body on the first hardpoint, which lit up like it was supposed to.  the second HP on the first body killed the christmas tree effect.

[Kirk]

Your program does not allow for varying levels of gray. It simply overwrites the existing alpha channel with your selected area as solid white.

Further more, I do not believe I have seen a ship to date that uses alpha channels as transparency maps*. You are confusing self-illumination with transparency. Again, as I said in my tutorial, the alpha channel for any _glow map will cause the map to illuminate itself based on the whiteness of the pixel (with white being the brightest, black being the darkest.)

*Actually, I think there have been a couple, Genty's TOS bussards and CG's Sov Bussards.

[genty]

Yep, my bussards do use the alpha channel as transparency, but they have to be set up as transparencies in the mesh otherwise they don't work as they should. It's the only way of getting around the animated glow problem. The TGA files are still set up with an alpha channel as normal except they instead control the opacity.

[MarkyD]

I know in certain games, the alpha channel is used for transparencies and not glows, but from what I have read on these forums these past few days, the apha channel is used for glows

Thats right mate, I know that SFCII & III both use the alpha channels for transparencies, mainly for nebulas and stuff, but can be added to models too if you know how.

But for BC as far as I have seen it is used mainly for glows, as Genty said, if you need transparencies in BC you have to affect the material in max too.

[King Class Scout]

I figured out what you guys ment when I went to clean up an assimilated Constitution.  it was based on Anduril's connie, and uses an animation effect on the bussards.  the motion ripple behind swaps three 10% transparency bussard caps to create the motion (like what, if I remember right Baz was having trouble with on one of his nacelles).  trying to create a new ripple effect (to be more Borgish) without redoing the original caps resulted in the motion cap overwriting the glow cap.  this is why I think most of this involves levels of transparency that can be set in Photoshop.

what it shows me (and anyone using a program like Irfanview to view "loose" skins) is the non-masked areas of the glows, and nothing else on the skin.  again, when I view masks with my program, the glows are there, at about 50% transparency.  the rest of the skin is replaced by the patterns that indicate "transparancy"  I'll have to post a pic that shows what these skins look like in Paintshop

btw, keep away from those IED's, markyd, and good luck.