How to lighten a dirt decal

[grayman]

The three dripping_slime05 decals paint pitch-black in 2.00.

 

I'd like to lighten them for my WIP, w/o pushing the originals through Photoshop and creating new dds files.

 

Is there a way to cut their opaqueness to 50% in the material definition? This would be the simplest method.

 

Thanks.

[Obsttorte]

What do you mean by "cut their opaqueness"?

[grayman]

Increase their transparency, so they lighten up.

[Obsttorte]

Well, the shader def says it is colored, so maybe converting the decal to fs and applying the _color spawnarg could have an effect. Or you create a copy of the def and add the keyword translucent. This normally gives a 50% opacity (roughly guessing from the way it looks).

 

I hope that helps.

[grayman]

Adding 'translucent' made no difference.

 

Making the decal a FS and applying "_color 1 0 0" gave me a green overlay, which makes no sense.

 

"colored" appears to be looking for shaderparm settings, but converting the decal to FS and adding "shaderparm3 0.5" (alpha channel) didn't do anything.

[Obsttorte]

Try _color 0.5 0.5 0.5.

[grayman]

I tried that when I tried _color 1 0 0 and it also had no effect.

[Obsttorte]

Just ried the _color spawnarg myself, worked perfectly for me. Don't know what you are doing wrong, though.

[grayman]

So you have a FS dripping_slime05* decal with _color rgb on it and you're able to fade the decal?

 

Do you have any other spawnargs on the FS?

[grayman]

And what are your ambient menu settings?

[Springheel]

I assume it's a blend filter, which means it can only darken what's underneath. Changing the colour shouldn't have any affect on the level of transparency, since it's not actually transparent.

 

I'm not aware of any easy way to do what you want without changing the original file.

[Obsttorte]

So you have a FS dripping_slime05* decal with _color rgb on it and you're able to fade the decal?

Yes

Do you have any other spawnargs on the FS?

No.

And what are your ambient menu settings?

Enhanced.

[grayman]

_color does work. I don't know why it's working now when it wasn't earlier.

 

The setting that allows more translucency w/o losing the texture (for the slime05 textures) is 0.8. Below that the texture starts to fade away.

 

Thanks for your help, Obs.

 

Edit: Well, it works in a small test map. In my WIP, the results are still unsatisfactory. angua has a light version of one of the other slime textures. I'll try that route and see if the results are better.

[Springheel]

If it's a blend filter, to make it more transparent you just "lighten" it.

[Obsttorte]

Edit: Well, it works in a small test map. In my WIP, the results are still unsatisfactory. angua has a light version of one of the other slime textures. I'll try that route and see if the results are better.

Maybe it depends a bit on how much light hits the decal. In the testmap were I've checked it the ambient was pretty high.

[angua]

Maybe it's an inverted filter stage. So the used texture is white where the dirt should be and the shader does "1 - image" which results in dark dirt. If you darken the image with the color keyword, the resulting dirt becomes brighter. Using a larger color of 0.8 will cause the dirt to become a little bit brighter, while larger values will cause it to fade and become more and more invisible.

[grayman]

Maybe it's an inverted filter stage. So the used texture is white where the dirt should be and the shader does "1 - image" which results in dark dirt. If you darken the image with the color keyword, the resulting dirt becomes brighter. Using a larger color of 0.8 will cause the dirt to become a little bit brighter, while larger values will cause it to fade and become more and more invisible.

 

Yes, these three are inverted. I'll try different values and see what I get. I had decided last night to replace these with different dirt decals, and the replacements look much better. But for future reference, it would be nice to know how to keep the 05 trio from totally blackening the underlying texture.