Transparency Troubles!

[draggan]

Hi.
I just recently went back to do some reskining, and was planning on making a Spectral Tiger influenced Proto-drake.

So, yeah, i got stuck at the transparency part. I'm trying to make the skin of the proto-drake semi-transparent.

What I did was that I just made the BLP into PNG (also tried TLG), edited it as it suited me in PS CS4, and made the parts I wanted transparant (turning Opacity down to around 50% on the right layer etc) and smacked it into a MPQ etc. The texture looks fine and is transparent before i convert it into a BLP, but doesnt give the same results ingame.

After that, it turned out like this: Imageshack - 31979845.jpg

Ive also been messing around with DBC (looking at guides and such to help me with that). Not sure if Im suposed to use DBC for it, but atleast i tried. Trying to change transparency level of the proto-drake in CreatureDisplayInfo.dbc etc. It didnt seem to change anything though.

Any ideas?

I've searched for a guide to help me with this, unfortunally, I found nothing, which explains why Im making this thread (correct me if I just totally missed a guide answering my question)

+RepCookies for anyone that helps me out! nom nom :3

[Grymskvll]

You need to change the actual model to allow transparency. I'm not sure if it's still compatible or whatnot, but try Cryect's m2modder.

[draggan]

You need to change the actual model to allow transparency. I'm not sure if it's still compatible or whatnot, but try Cryect's m2modder.

Yep, i figured it was something about the actual model instead of the texture. Unfortunally, Crytect's m2modder doesn't seem to work anymore, crashes as soon as I give a command to it. I'll hand you rep for the effort though. Thanks :3 (need to spread, gawd)

There aught to be some other program out there which does the same as Crytect's, but is hopefully up to date, Ill look around abit and see what I find, and ill come back with my result.

Any help is still appreciated most greatly!

[draggan]

I've now been searching around abit, and found a nifty little Art Of Illusion m2modder plugin made by Tigurius.(here) Tried it out, but coulnt really figure out how it works... Yes, I am a newbie to all this. So I'm wondering, does anyone have any experience with this? Or know of any other way to modify m2's transparency?

[Tigurius]

http://www.mmowned.com/forums/world-...scriptlib.html

from m2 import *

m2 = M2File("Blah.m2")
for i in m2.transparency: #iterate transparency
	for a in i.alpha.KeySubs:
		for t in a.values:
			t = 0x4FFF #range from 0(fully transparent) to 0x7FFF (fully opaque)

m2.write("Blah.m2")

[draggan]

I Get the following error when trying to import the made blah.py file:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x90' in file C:\Phyton26\blah.py on line 1, but no encoding declared

It doesnt seem to find your library?

I might not have done the SVN checkout at the right place, or its something else. Did the checkout in the main folder and Lib (just to be sure).

Programming aint my best subject, and I've never even touched python :<

Any ideas?

[Tigurius]

hm, maybe try writing the text off instead of copy&past, it seems, like there is something strange in your blah.py file^^
And if it needs to have the m2.py etc. in the same dir like the blah.py file.

[draggan]

I would happily write it, IF I could get it into plain text (its all disturbingly coded)... There's bound to be a program to actually turn it into plain text so i can understand (Maybe you know of this program and would like to share?)!

Tried with a diffrent m2, just acts up the same, always complaining about "Line 1". But I just cant figure out what "Line 1" IS without it being in plain text! How did you get your m2's to show up in plain text?

And yeah, all the files are stacked up neatly together.

Need sleep now though, stupid UTC+1...

[Toyoka]

Make sure that your file name is "Blah", as written in the code, not "blah" (as it seems you have named it) or vice versa. That is most likely the problem. Hope that helped

[draggan]

Tried both combinations, Blah and blah. Doesnt change anything, same Syntax error, thanks for the tip though. Jesus, this is getting frustrating >.<

[Tigurius]

Ok, did you check out the svn with svn(SubVersioN)? Or just dled the html files(which fails)?
Also all files of the lib should be in the same dir like blah.py.

[draggan]

I'll go over all the steps I've done so far.

I first went to your Pym2 checkout. Used TortoiseSVN on this link which was provided through checkout: http://pym2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
The checkout was done inside the Python folder. I also dragged out the contents of the Pym2 folder into the Python folder.

I then made a .txt file named "Blah.txt", took my .m2 file (ProtoDragonMount.m2 in this case), made the m2 into a txt file and copied the coding (ill give you an example of what the coding looks like, since I kinda think this might be the problem.

MD20
 @
  `
1 p
Y ° ]

Now, I cant understand that.

So yeah, i copied all the coding, pasted it into the Blah.txt, made it into a .py (Blah.py). Ran the Python.exe, and used this command:

import Blah

I uploaded the error ff you'd like to take a look: Imageshack - pythonerror.png

[Tigurius]

Ah, what I meant, was:
You should copy the text I wrote up there, make that in a Blah.py file and replace the Text Blah.m2 with the filename of your m2. then run the Blah.py

[draggan]

So i should look like this, correct?

from m2 import *

m2 = M2File("ProtoDragonMount.m2")
for i in m2.transparency: #iterate transparency
    for a in i.alpha.KeySubs:
        for t in a.values:
            t = 0x4FFF #range from 0(fully transparent) to 0x7FFF (fully opaque)

m2.write("ProtoDragonMount.m2")

Getting an error saying: Imageshack - pythonerror.png

I guess i should also edit the line-
t = 0x4FFF #range from 0(fully transparent) to 0x7FFF (fully opaque)
-to what transparent level i want, yeah? I'm not sure what to edit though.

[Tigurius]

Try Python 2.6.
And yes t = 0x4FFF is the Hexadecimal value of 20479 full opaque is 32767, where lower numbers are less opaque.