Creating textures with see-through parts?

Here is a big question...

I am trying to create manakins of some of the Star Wars characters for one of my coasters, but I am having a huge problem with the 3ds textures.

It's kind of tough to explain this, so bear with me...
Basically, what I am trying to do is have transparent portions on my textures. I have seen lots of textures that have done this before... a single texture has a portion which shows up, and a portion that doesn't. Basically, when you use a single plane, there are see-through portions of it even though the surface is solid and the rest of the image shows up. How do you do this?

EXAMPLE:
Suppose I want to create the image of a ring with nothing but a plane. (this keeps me from wasting polygons). I have the image of a ring, with a completley white background on a square texture. How could I make it so that you could see through the center of the ring, and the white on the outside would go away so that the image ended at the edges of the ring?

If anyone knows anything about how to do this, please let me know. This will be vital to the completion of my Star Wars coaster, as well as to the animated shorts I am scheming up.

Ive spent ages trying to figure this out aswell cjd, and so far, i have not yet managed to do it. I would also like to hear an aswer to this question [:D]

I guess fewer people know about this than I thought...

Who was it that made the 3ds for the "Wild Mouse In Da' House" contest? That had a see-through texture or two...

This problem is also bothering me because whenever I try to make custom station parts, there is a giant blob wall that keeps you from seeing anything.

[GRIM.657]

Originally posted by Real

Its actually quite easy...My original TTD and the TTD2003 both feature it.

This is for Photoshop but I know it can be donw with Paint Shop Pro as well.

If its say, a fence, highlight all the area around the fence. Make sure you have a layer beneath that layer because when you delete all of this you want it so show through with transparency.


Delete everything but what you want to show.


Now, Invert the selection so you have your railing/fence selected. In the Layer panel on the side, click the Channels path.

Inside will be a R, G and B channel representing the 3 color channels required to make the picture. Click the little icon that looks like a new paper called "Create New Channel" and it will create a black and white Alpha channel. With your selection still on the screen, go to Edit > Fill and choose WHITE in the drop down menu.

What you should have is a white outline of your object.



Now save it as a Targa file with 32bit and you are all set.


Get into Max. Import the texture as a Bitmap. Apply to your polygon. Then make sure to apply a UVW Map Modifier (as you probably already do) and then save it!

Bring it into NL and voila! Alpha texturing. This is very, very handy for things like hand rails, fences, etc. Anything thats repeatable (or not) and would require alot of polygons but can be gotten away with by using a simple 2D plane (thats only 2 polygons) and looks like many more.

erm... Somthing like that?

Yes, you must use a texture format that supports alpha channels basically, targa being the most commonly used example.

Grr... eveything requires photoshop. That pisses me off. Is there any way to do it without forking over my entire bank account for one piece of software?

EDIT: actually, the computer labs at school have Paint Shop, so how do you do it with that?

SECOND EDIT: Okay, never mind about that either. I found photoshop for about 20 bucks on Ebay, so I'll just be a cheap bastard and buy it there.