Lighting Problem --- SOLVED

[UberNube]

***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:

[p0lar_bear]

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

[UberNube]

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.

[Malolo420]

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

[UberNube]

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.

[UberNube]

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.