Transarent Surfaces?

[Vortex]

Hello everyone. I am a newbee in the purrest sense, and just like a true newbee I have jumped in and gone straight
for a ship design :-). I have read through several tutorials and have been doing ok until it came to getting a semi
transparrent dome to work. I can either get a transpatent dome but no texture or a domw with the texture on it.
everything I have read says that the texture should have the transapentcy level of the surface. Any help would be
greatly apreciated.

BTW. the ship is of course the Valley Forge from the movie Silent Running. The dome loks great in the editor it even
looks pretty good with the non transparent dome (yellow with the triangular cross bracing for support) but I would
like to see it in Orbiter with gardens visible through the dome.

Can't wait to learn about setting up the engines and stuff.......

[MadMike]

Vally Forge is an Anim8tor file
in Anima8tor you can not mix transparancy with solid colour or texture
you need to make 2 domes 1 with transperancy and 1 with another texture or colour
and overlay 1 ontop of the other
this is the same with any animm8tor file if using MeshMaker to transform to Orbitor mesh
maybe with 3ds2mesh it will work but I have never tried it

good luck

[Vortex]

[Vortex]

Sorry about that still working on gettting a pic up loaded.



Hope this worked

[McBrain]

It doesn't work!

[Krytom]

The 2nd one works.

[Vortex]

I was unable to get it to work using 2 meshes overlapped. but after playing around and trying a few things I
was able to get the gridwork to be visible while the rest would be transparent.

How? It's a secret.

Translation:

I did it but haven't tried to duplocate it yet, that's next. Here is a rundown of how I think it works.

Creat .bmp testure file, but also creat an inverse of that file. ( i.e. black is white ....)
Next I loaded the .bmp into DirectX texture tool and changed the surface texture format to dx1 then I set the view to
alpha only and loaded the inverse bmp as the alpha.
Then save as the .dds file in orbiter textures.

For the yellow I did have to use a second dome mesh that was added under the first but not touching it.

[Vortex]

New pic with the domw at Habana Station on Mars.

[Krytom]

Have you considered uploading JPGs instead of GIFs. I find GIFs aren't good for static pictures and they take up more
space.

[Vortex]

Sorry about that. I also forgot to make them smaller in size too. Fixed the second one but it will not let me edit the
first pic I posted.

[Vortex]

Here is the first pic after I fixed it.