Making animations with transparency

Scripting Issues
1

I’m trying to use the animated explosion textures on the Blender texture cd. They’re a group of 40+ jpg images which have black where they should be transparent. I’ve been using the egg-texture-cards.exe to make animations, but I need to make the black transparent on those images. Is there a way Panda can do this, or is there some feature in Blender those images were designed to use?

2

jpg don’t have an alpha(transparency)channel, you could use tga, but every application I know writes/reads transparency in a different way in tga. Save your images as PNG, from my experience they work fine with panda3D (dds dxt5 are also good)

3

I know jpg can’t support transparency. That’s why I was confused that a transparent animation was in that format (all of the animations from that source are jpg). There must be some trick to using them. But I suppose that has more to do with Blender than Panda so I should ask there.

I’d still like to know if there’s any way to use images with a solid color background (in whatever format, I can easily convert image types) so that the solid color is instead transparent. I could do it with a lot of Photoshop work, but before I try photoshopping 40 images I’d like to see if anyone tried anything similar before.

4

Amugaba the manual is your best friend:
http://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Transparency_and_Blending
Personally I find so easy to use png that use always that format but you may certainly make transparency with jpg as well in panda3d.

5

There’s no way in Panda to use a solid color to indicate transparency (though you could write a Python program that would load up each image in a directory, examine the image file, and add an alpha channel that corresponded to where your solid color was, and write it back out with the alpha channel).

David

6

Thanks for all the responses. I found an easy way to hide a single color so I thought I’d post it here in case someone else wants to use it.

To make a single color transparent, just use Photoshop.

  1. Selection > Color Range. Pick your color and fuzziness level.
  2. Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection
    And done.