? about Skinning

[Grakl]

Greetings,

I'm learning...well, experimenting with skinning models. For my first attempt I skinned an axeman all white (Painted over axeman_128.dds in all white) and loaded the model into the game. Unfortunately it must not be that easy. In the game the axeman now shows up highly shaded with the team color. It eventually loses most of the shading as I zoom into the unit. Any theories of why and how to stop that from hapenning, does it have to do with the edges of the skin being black or alpha channels? I havn't found a skinning tutorial in the TR&G section yet so if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

 

[Chamaedrys]

Well, I don't which editor you use but: there a two pictures, 'norm' which hove coloures and look like the unit in the game, and 'trans' or alpha which is only black and white. All the areas that are black in 'trans' will be coloured in the player colour.

The areas of 'norm' and 'trans' are specific for a single part of the unit. So If you paint the area with the hands purple, the unit got purple hands in the game. If you paint the area which are for hands black in 'trans', the hands of the unit will have the player colour.
I would not recommend to everything in one colour or over paint everthing. This could easily look boring. It's often better to change the colour of an hole area with an editor, because you can keep the texture of this area. This is very useful if you want to give an uniform a different colour.

Now to your Problem:

I have coloured some parts of my unit white and it wasn't a problem. I would suggest to check the alpha chanal for the teamcolour and the parts (in trans) that you don't wanted to be teamcoloured white.

Could you add a screenshot?

 

[Grakl]

Your answer fixed my problem. I'm using GIMP and did my usual save but apparently I never changed the alpha channel (I'm not proficient enough to know where it is yet ><). I opened up my skin in DXTBMP and set the alpha channel to white. It works now without overlapping the player color. It was mostly a proof of concept and tinkering. Thanks very much for the help.

 

[Chamaedrys]

Your using DXTBMP? Cool, I use that, too.