Alpha Map Lesson

I have to say first off, that materials in the Game Engine aren't exactly tied in with the
materials for the normal Blender Modeling Mode...

Example..

Add a plane in Blender, facing along the Y-axis..

Switch back to 'Object' mode.. then press 'F' to enter the 'UV Face Select Mode'...
In the view port to the right, switch to 'UV Image Editor'. You'll see a blue square
representing your plane. Click on 'Image, Open' and select an image that already has
an alpha map (IE. png, .tga formats can contain an alpha map within the same file).
Alpha map, referring to an image with transparent parts.
I need to rotate mine, so, I'll put my mouse cursor over my '3D View' window to the
left, and press 'R' until the image on my plane to the left, is facing the same directions
as the image to the right in the "UV Image Edit" window. Click on 'UV Coordinates'
when asked after pressing 'R'. Finally, in the 'Buttons' view port at the bottom, under
the 'Texture Face" tab, click the 'Alpha' button to make your plane transparent where
it should be based on the image's alpha map. Also, click 'Twosided' so your plane will
show the image on each side.
Also, with the vertex color set on white, you may want to click 'set VertCol' so the
true colors show on your plane.

What we have above will work for a transparent game object, however, it won't
render correctly if we wish to use this in an image or animation. (Image Below)
If we press 'P' to start the game, it looks great for a transparent object. (Below)
To create a transparent image for rendering, we'll need to create a new Material for
our Plane. With our plane selected, click the "Shading" button (or press 'F5') then
click 'Add New' under the 'Link to Object' tab...

Go over and click the 'Add New' under the Texture tab. Click the Textures button
(F6), Texture Type, select image.. Go over to the 'Image Tab' which just has a load
button at this time and a scroll arrow. Click the scroll arrow and select your image
which should still be listed. If not, reload it by pressing the load button and finding
your file.
Since the image were using contains it's own Alpha Map, simply click the 'Use Alpha'
button under the 'Map Image' tab. Under the 'Preview Tab', click the 'Alpha' button
to see a preview of your image with it's transparent background...

Pressing 'F12' now for a quick render, you'll see we need to make a couple more
adjustments before we get the desired results...
Click the "Material" button.

Under the 'Map To' tab, make sure you have the 'Alpha' button pressed.

Under the 'Material' tab, the bottom right slider bar is labeled 'A'. Scrolling over it,
you'll see it stands for 'Alpha'. Sliding this down to 0, will allow the sky material to
show through our plane..
The next button we need to push, is the 'Ztrans' button under the 'Links and Pipeline'
tab. This will allow everything else in our project to show through our plane...

Pressing 'F12' now for a test render of our plane, will show our plane with the results
below...
There's still 2 problems with our plane. First is, the slight shading where the
transparent parts of our image is. This can be corrected under the 'Shaders' tab.
Slide the "Ref" slider all the way over to 1.0. Turn the "Spec" all the way down to
0.00 and the "Hard" slider all the way down as well to 1.

That takes care of our plane. The last problem we have to deal with is the fact that
the shadow of our plane is still a square and not a shadow of our splatter image. To
fix this, we'll need to create a new material for our ground plane. Under the
'Shaders' tab of our new material, press the 'TraShad' button to allow transparent
shadows to be rendered on our ground plane. Any object that you wish to have
Transparent shadows rendered on will need to have this button pressed.

Our final result looks like this.

It is possible to achieve the result using 2 different images. For example, one color
image of a brick wall and a second image, Black and White, black being the
transparent parts, white being the solid parts. Use this image as the alpha map for
your brick wall to add windows.

Playing with these options some, you can easily create stain glass windows.
It took me a long time to figure these out with blender. Hope this helps.

Feel free to email me with any questions.

Scott

Blender3Dclub.com