I wanted to go through the tutorial from the last Blenderart Issue Nr. 16, and for some reason, my billboards are not transparent at the borders, but show up as squares. Seems like the second layer, Smoke_Alpha, basically colours the whole billboard and the Mask does not work properly. Can anybody help me, please? Might just be a bug in the system…
I had the same problem when I first did it. You can download the .blend that comes with the mag to see what he did. I think he just left out a step in to tutorial. You need to make a third texture and call it smoke_mask, make it a image and load the image you drew in the Image Editor and turn off usealpha. Finish setting up the texture by picking it up at step 24.
Hope that helps.
I’ve also been playing with this tutorial and found one other minor point: In step 12; you set up the Smoke_alpha texture - you need to jump into the Colours tab and bump up the contrast, otherwise the smoke looks a little hazy. The authors blend file had it at 2.07.