Animated textures, transparency and glowing(?) for weapon model

[679bb4eaadce3Olfred]

I am currently working on a new weapon model for the laser rapier. Since I'm not so familiar with ss2 editing and NewDark I hope someone might be able to help me out.

I'm thinking about adding a animated texture to the blade to get some kind of pulsating effect on it to get some kind of feeling the laser actually get castet.
Also it would be nice to get some kind of bloom effect on the weapon if that is possible?

Lastly I used the 3ds to bin tool which comes in this package, but no matter what I put into the transparency settings it doesn't seem to have any effect, did I miss something?

[679bb4eaadeb0voodoo47]

texture animation can be set up quite easily, just by taking a batch of textures and naming them properly (pic_.png, pic_1.png, pic_2.png etc). plus, you can add a lot of effects with the mtl system, see material-format.txt. as for the bloom effect, that will be applied automatically to all bright textures when hdr/bloom is enabled, if I'm not mistaken.

[679bb4eaadffbZylonBane]

Yup, bloom is a user-configured full-frame post-processing effect. Modders have zero direct control over it.

[679bb4eaae341Zygo]

Lastly I used the 3ds to bin tool which comes in this package, but no matter what I put into the transparency settings it doesn't seem to have any effect, did I miss something?

I've never used the direct 3ds to bin utility, only the command line programs its based on, and cannot recall any issues with transparency. You can manually add the transparency property to the materials in the intermediate (e) file, eg:

Code: [Select]

MATERIALS{
1,"material06",,TMAP "bact1a.gif",0,TRANSP 0;
2,"material05",,TMAP "bact1b.gif",0,TRANSP 0;
3,"material01",,TMAP "bact1tt.gif",0,TRANSP 0;
4,"material04",,TMAP "bact1t.gif",0,TRANSP 0;
5,"material03",,TMAP "bact1_.gif",0,TRANSP 0;
6,"material02",,TMAP "Blue.gif",0,TRANSP 25;
7," -- default --",,RGB 224,224,224,TRANSP 0;
}when converted to bin has a partly transparent blue background (and animating bact1_.gif too).

[679bb4eaae4d1Olfred]

The material-format.txt sounds interesting, thanks for pointing that out.
But what exactly is considered a "bright" texture?

Zygo, what tools do you use?
NamelessVoice pointed out to me that with meshbld you can't get transparency and I have to work on the *.bin with meshup and mattweak. Which got me a working model with transparency.

Thanks for your help

EDIT

One little problem still remains.
When I use the *.cal which get's generated I get some clipping errors as seen here.
Everything is working normal when I let the game use the original one.

[679bb4eaae711Olfred]

Again having a big problem.

When I try to use meshbuild to get a bin out of the e it crashes and I just can't figure out what causes this.

I packed the files into a zip and would appreciate it if someone could take a look at it and point out what I am doing wrong.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6pm5cl

EDIT

Well, I fixed that problem for now.
Somehow there was a problem with the faces aroud the wrist. I duplicated them, deleted the "old ones" and the just used the duplicated ones instead, that fixed it.

Sadly a new problem emerged. Now the laser inside the blade, the light blue thing isn't visible ingame.
I had that problem before and fixed it with making the blade (the "normal" blue outside thing) be a closed "box".
Somehow that doesn't fix it this time.

Man, the dark engine and the tools are driving me insane.