HaloMods "Classic" Read-only Archive

***SOLVED***

I have been working on my first proper map using 3DS MAX 7. It is entirely indoors so I need lighting. I have followed a few tutorials and managed to get the lights working, but they still refuse to become invisible. Please help me with this as I have tried everything I can think of.

at the moment I have:

a bitmap for the lights which is all white with no alpha
a shader for that bitmap
the light texture called "light!%" (! = no-collide, % = double sided)
several planes set to this texture placed around the map

I have tried:

adding "*" or "%" to the texture name to make them no-render (they produced no light)
not assigning a bitmap to them
setting that bitmap to have no alpha channel
setting that bitmap to have a black alpha
messing with shader settings

Also of interest may be the fact that tool refuses to save the bitmap with explicit-alpha.

screenshot:

Can you upload or take screenshots of your shader_environment and your bitmap tags, and post them so we can have a look?

light.shader_environment

The bitmap is just a white square (64x64) with no alpha.
The bitmap tag for it is set to compress it with explicit alpha, but it refuses, probably because it has no alpha to compress.

If it doesn't have an alpha compress it with colour key, not explicit.

It did compress with colour-key, but even when I had it set with a pure black alpha it would not save with explicit alpha.

I have found a solution now. After quite a bit of fiddling with settings and shaders, I found that if you use a Shader_Transparent_Generic with only the top section filled in, then it works. Sapien gave me some errors about an unsupported shader type, but overall the lights worked and were invisible.

When I have more time (after my art GCSE) then I will write up a more complete tutorial on indoor lighting.