I’ve been trying to get some transparent textures working for doing leaves. I have made an image with an alpha channel in Photoshop. I saved the image as tif, tga and png because i wanted to see which was best.
When I assigned the square texture to a plane in Blender, I would expect to see it render the outline of the leaf and make the background of the image transparent. So, I turned on use alpha and the preview box correctly shows the background as the greyish shapes that symbolise when something is transparent.
However, this only happens with tifs and not png or tga. Photoshop looks like it’s saving the alpha channel because the option is selected (though it’s greyed out) so I don’t understand why it’s not saving. I had the same issue with Maya and I had to use tifs all the time. I suspect it’s a Photoshop thing.
The biggest problem is that although in the texture panel the preview is showing correctly, the material panel preview does not. It still shows the solid background as does the render. Do I have to use any special mapping settings to get it to render right?
if your image already has an alpha channel, turn on ‘use alpha’, then over in the material window, where the ‘col’ button is checked, check also ‘alpha’, then go over to the left, click on the ray menu, click ztransp, and turn the alpha slider all the way down. You may also wish to make a map for spec. If there is a ‘card’ that needs to cast a shadow, you must click ‘trashad’ for the recieving material. I believe you must have raytracing enabled to use trashad.
