Hi there, So recently I decided to play with skinning. I read a fair bit on the topic (at least I thought) Made my skin, but then had a couple of problems. One of which was about the alpha layer and the car coming out far too glossy. I have photoshop cs4 and cs5 however they are both on the macs I use. So can't use the normal dds plugin. To make things easier I just use gimp. Make things look how I want, flatten the layers so styles don't mess up going over to gimp. Then in gimp, I still have an alpha channel. The best I have achieved is a glossy car or a glossy black car, I suspect this is a gimp problem. So I have tried to alter the alpha channel in ps before saving out the file. Despite this I get the same result :-( Problem 2 is it never uploads, thanks for the flashing square? Can't i have a progress bar or show how much data has been transmit. After 20mins it gives up and everyone else has a black square. Why is the default skin for the corvette given a such a shiny alpha? Or is this more a gimp export problem?
Can you just compare alpha channel in final skin texture produced by your workflow with one of original skin textures from rF2? This would tell you if there's something different about your alpha channel. Other than that, it's hard to give you a straight answer, based just on description.
Thanks when I get back I will have a look. I mean, if I take the ISI corvette skin psd file and do the conversion I think it is exactly the same. So maybe I should try that and compare
I tried the following: * Downloaded the original Vette skin again * opened in gimp2 (no editing) * exported with dxt5 / mip map gen * car was white, as reflective as my previous too reflective skin and had reduced colour decals. Possibly from the amount of reflection map over the top. very reflective like super gloss (Vette badge etc) -- Did as above with ps elements3 which I own for pc. If you add the 32 bit version of the nv plugin it is compatible with ps elements regardless of os architecture. (Maybe hint this on the dev page)? I got a red glossy car (as glossy but I think as intended by the original base skin) at least it looked sort of expected. Just still too shiny To recap I haven't made it any less glossy yet. When playing with the alpha in gimp2 I have adjusted the fill colour for the gloss from white. Even more glossy ? Didn't think it was possible. To black the car is still glossy and becomes black in game. Annoyingly you can't adjust the alpha properly in photoshop elements but you can add bits to it etc. and it does ( I think ) what I want. Just hard to set it properly as the alpha is a selection in ps elements. Super lame! Let me try a photoshop cs to elements conversion to see what I get. Gimp is kinda out of the question for now. It is clearly doing odd things. It could be any number of how it handles ps files, alpha channels or exports DDS I will try and find out when I have more time to read the dds files back in? Didn't realise you could do that. I have only just tried my hand at this stuff.
All works as expected if I use PS CS4/5 and do the conversion with PS Elem. 3. Something really is not working right with Gimp2 and it's exporter. Of course it could be the interpretation of the PSD, but this seems unlikely following the test earlier ? I don't know how to fix Gimp, as I suspect it is just the dds export plugin that isn't working as expected.
In build 515, skins successfully upload. Alpha channel all working as expected. Now I can at least play with it a bit now
