Ok I succeeded in creating an animated texture model of a missile exhaust plume using the ‘egg-texture-cards’ utility. I do not plan to billboard the plume. I do intend to create a nodepath with two plumes and rotate one of them so that they are orthogonal to each other. I want to place the resulting node at the missile model’s exhaust outlet and orient it with the missile … cheesecake to do this in P3D THANKS!
Just two problems …
The model created is rendered as a one sided textured quad. I want it rendered as a two sided textured quad (as in GL_FRONT_AND_BACK?). How would I do this?
In some of the models I create, the transparent area of the images shows up black (32 bit targas for example). In some others it shows up transparent like I want it to be (32 bit pngs for example). What criteria do I need to understand in order to get my animations to render with the alpha areas transparent? I called model.setTransparency(1) …
The key is that Panda has to be able to read the alpha channel of your texture properly. Unfortunately, I believe there are a few problems with our targa image file format loader; it doesn’t always understand the alpha channel. If you stick with png or tiff you should be fine.