How to make transparent parts of a texture with just one TGA,which includes main tex?
 

How to make transparent parts of a texture with just one TGA,which also includes the main texture?

I've made an alpha layer in my TGA of what I want visible, and what I want transparent. But how can I get this to work in Maya?

And more importantly, how can I make this work with the direct X format, .x.

I'm not sure you can have several textures with the X format so I'm hoping that the Alpha layer in TGA images will solve this for me.

should just be able to map the targa to your object's material. You right-click your object, choose Materials>AddNewMaterial>(whatever material you want) In the window that pops up there should be a little black and white checkered box to the right of the color slider. Click it, then select "file" then click the folder button in the next window to browse for your targa image file. Click open, then you should have what you want.

Yeah, well, duh... I know how to use it as a texture... but how does I get the alpha layer to make it transparent?

Like I said, it should just do it automatically. It does for me... I can take any targa and just load it into Maya as a file texture and the transparency is clearly visible. I even tried this again just to make sure.

WHen you go to your material's attributes, make sure both the transparency and color are mapped to your targa file. If they are and it still doesn't show, try clicking on the checkered box to the right of the transparency slider to bring you to the transparency thing. Look under the colorBalence tab and play with the Alpha gain making it 0 or -1. If THAT doesn't work, try setting the Alpha offset to 1 or -1 with Alpha Gain as -1 0 or 1. ONE of those HAS to work if the alpha gain/offset thing is your problem. =P

If you still can't get it to work, I have absolutely no idea what it is. If I had a guess, I'd say that you did something wrong when putting the alpha layer in your image to begin with.

I got it to work, but it needed to be a 32 Bit targa.

ahhh really? wow I never knew that. Guess you learn something new everyday. =P

yes, every channel is 8 bits. 24 bits means you have 3 channels (RGB) 32 bits adds that 4th channel (Alpha).