Problem with glowing textures

**SigniferOne** · February 02, 2008, 12:00 AM

I've been away from MTW2 modeling for a month, and when I came back for some reason I started producing units that glow:

Don't mind how the soldiers stick out from the ground, they're just missing horses that's all. But that their texture is glowing concerns me. It is the fault of the normal texture, since replacing it with some vanilla examples fixes the problem, and I've been trying to retrace my old steps for normals creation, to no awail. What could be the fault here?

It's not the DXT format, as the normal texture glows just as much in DXT1 as in DXT5. I just apply the NormalMap filter in Photoshop, to the depth of 5 as always, ... and export. What else was there?

**The Bruce** · February 02, 2008, 12:23 AM

Could it be that you are missing the alpha channel?

**SigniferOne** · February 02, 2008, 12:31 AM

Well I'm exporting it as DXT5, that must export the alpha right?

**The Bruce** · February 02, 2008, 12:38 AM

Yes it should. The image just looked like it might be due to an overbright alpha. If you reopen the .dds is the alpha OK? Just a shot in the dark (or glowing light as the case may be).

**SigniferOne** · February 02, 2008, 12:51 AM

Does it ever help to tinker with the minute DDS settings? I did find out to set Alpha to binary, but the rest of the settings mean nothing to me, I hope I didn't turn them off by accident. Is there anything important of settings (other than binary alpha) that jumps to mind?

**The Bruce** · February 02, 2008, 01:13 AM

I had some trouble with modified alphas not saving properly a while ago (not like yours though - but a bit too bright).

My workaround is to open a texture with DXTBmp send it to photoshop make a normal texture with it and save it as a bitmap. Then I open up the appropriate vanilla normal texture with DXTBmp send it to an editor, paste my new normal bmp over it and reload it into DXTBmp. If you dont need to mess with the alpha channel the new normal texture can be saved in DXTBmp with the original alpha. IIRC it was ony when I modified the alpha that I got a problem so I stopped doing it!

I now have a trial version of CS3 and the default settings seem to produce "good" alphas. Are you using CS3? I just save as DXT5 ARGB 8bpp interpolated alpha.

What does your saved alpha look like when you reopen it?

EDIT It appears that I can now modify alphas without any problems with the new version of DXTBmp - when I save them as "Creative Assembly DXT5 Textures" they are fine.

**SigniferOne** · February 02, 2008, 01:58 AM

It appears it was the alpha after all. Our modeler forgot to do the alpha for a whole series of units, so it seemed like I was doing something wrong while I was just adapting what he already had. Will be fixed, thanks, +rep.