General Question How to Make Semi-Transparent DDS Textures

[Interstellar Planet]

I tried to use a gray-scale image as an alpha channel in Directx Texture Tool but it only makes parts of the texture fully transparent or fully opaque. I also couldn't find a way to save a bmp image with semi-transparency. Does anyone know how to do this?

 

[orb]

If you save it as DXT1 it will be either fully transparent or fully opaque. You need to save it using DXT5 compression algorithm for the best results (8-bit alpha).

 

[Interstellar Planet]

I saved it as a DXT5 file but for some reason the texture now has no transparency.:huh:

 

[orb]

The DxTex included with Orbiter saves them just fine for me. I just tested it before writing this reply. :shrug:

How did you save the grayscale bitmap?


Newer versions of DxTex (from DirectX 9+ SDK) support other image formats, like PNG or TGA (as also they display correctly the loaded image in window, unlike the DirectX 7 version of DxTex from Orbiter), which by default support alpha channel (a 32-bit color BMP can also have alpha, but I'm not sure DxTex would support it).