[Q] Textures won't import properly?

[mass_gamer]

Ok, I've had this problem for a while now, and it's driving me nuts.

 

Every time I make a valid texture with an alpha channel, the alpha channel screws up when I import it into txd workshop. I have no idea why, but what I do know is that every time I import a texture, it screws up the same way.

 

Some screenshots below of an example of what happens.

 

1: I make the texture in photoshop; in this case a white background, and an alpha with OMG on it.

 

 

2: I save it as a 32-bit tga file.

 

3: I open my desired txd file in txd workshop, and select "new" > 32-bpp.

 

 

4: I import my texture only to get this...

 

 

Someone help me out here. Tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I need to do differently.

 

[RanxeroX]

Two things might be causing the problem - one with Photoshop and one with Txd Workshop.

 

I have no experience with Photoshop, I use Paint Shop Pro X2, but you might want to look into an option of Photoshop that adds the alpha mask to the alpha channel. It seems like your alpha channel data isn't being exported. See, when I make an alpha mask, it isn't automatically added to the alpha channel of the image. I have to go into my Layers menu and select the option 'Save mask to alpha channel'. The alpha data then becomes part of the overall image data. When exported, it'll be saved in the proper location in the .tga file. This is something you could do if you aren't already...

 

If you have no trouble with the alpha side of things, Txd Workshop can be kinda flaky when it comes to creating new textures to the list. Sometimes it seems to get something wrong and you'll have problems loading and configuring them. What seems to work better is to duplicate an existing texture entry, then just load in your image over top. Once you have the image, you can then set its properties to what you want. You can manually change it to include the alpha if it wasn't recognized automatically. Set the alpha name to the texture name plus an 'a' tacked on the end. Don't forget to set the compression to DXT3 for alpha-channel images.

 

If neither of these methods help, it could be similar to a quirk I have with Paint Shop Pro. I've found that the Targa (.tga) files it exports are incompatible with Txd Workshop's idea of them. So what I have to do is export the file in .tga format, load it into an earlier version of PSP, then save it as a .tga file again. The older version creates the Targa format file that Txd Workshop likes - go figure! So you might want to try something similar if the other suggestions don't pan out.

 

[quechus13]

Use TGA Image Format

 

Import the image then select alpha on txd then import the image again

[mass_gamer]

Thanks for the help RanxeroX, it gave me a lot of important information on how to format my images. I just discovered that if I import a PNG file, TXD workshop will create the alpha just fine. If I have issues with that in the future, I'll start using PaintShop Pro, but if PNGs do the job for me, then that works.

 

EDIT: Nevermind, the PNG file format isn't working for me either. Could someone who successfully creates textures what version of Photoshop/TXDworkshop they use, and how to properly export it? Thanks a lot.

Edited April 12, 2010 by mass_gamer