Help making objects transparent?

[Cunico 995]

Title says it all, but I'm not sure how to achieve this in O2. I have some tactical glasses I made with hoods, and basically want to make multiple transparent variants. I only know how to make them reflective...but how do I make them clear and kinda dark? thanks for the help in advance.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

To make things have a transparency you need to create an alpha channel in your texture and save the image as a 32-bit .tga with the _ca suffix at the end of the texture name (so you'd save it as mytexture_ca.tga or whatever, and make sure it's in 32-bit). Then when it converts to .paa it should render correctly.

How familiar are you with how to make alpha channels? Basically you'll want to make whatever parts of the texture space that relate to the lenses of your glasses, a shade between black (totally transparent - i.e invisible) and white (completely opaque) in the alpha channel and keep all other areas of the alpha, white so that they remain opaque.

If you are using procedurally generated textures to colour the lenses using the Face Properties window in O2, rather than having the lenses UVed and coloured by a diffuse texture you can also make transparencies by tweaking a couple of values in the array.

The procedurals generated by the Face Properties colour picker are of a format #(argb,8,8,3)color(R,G,B,A,SUFFIX) Where the R,G,B are Red, Green and Blue colour values, A is the Alpha Channel (Scales between 0=black=transparent, and 1=white=opaque, so a value of 0.5 would be 50% opacity) and SUFFIX relates to the texture type suffix you would be using for this particular texture if it was a .tga or .paa (in this case we use CA instead of CO because we have an alpha channel).

So for example, you'd need to change the format from something like #(argb,8,8,3)color(1.0,0.0,0.0,1.0,CO) (this is an opaque, red, 24-bit procedural texture) to something like #(argb,8,8,3)color(1.0,0.0,0.0,0.2,CA) (this is a 20% opacity, red, 32-bit procedural texture).

[Cunico 995]

Wow, this about covers everything that I needed I believe. Thanks man, wasn't expecting this but this is great breaks it down a lot better than google does. I will let you know if I have any issues, thanks again.