Inserting a none-square image

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hihi!

I’m currently working on a project, and need some help.
My problem is this:

I’ve got a picture I want to insert into Blender. I do it by adding it as a texture. The thing is that the picture isn’t square, neither round. It’s practically just some mesh. I want the background to be transparent! I have tried a few things:

  1. Add it as a texture on the window. The “dirt” is supposed to be on the window, so why not add it as a texture here? Well, it works fine, but (there’s always a but…) I need to have the image as a single object, containing nothing else than the picture. This is because the dirt are just supposed to lay on the window for a while, not actually be a part of it. And of course the dirt shouldn’t have reflection (I know how to come around that, but that’s not the point).

  2. Option two was to make a new object, and add the picture as a texture here. The picture is a transparent PNG, so I enabled transparency in the image-texture settings. Okey, I got that right. The transparent areas of my picture became transparent. But now the colour of the material shined through instead. Arhh! :mad:
    To counter that, I sat alpha at 0 on the material, and enabled ZTransp. When I now render, everything is fine, except that the image is a bit darker, and that somehow, there’s still a dark background.
    http://nwf.webskolen.com/vindu.png
    You see the dirt in the middle of the window, and the dark square around it?
    Please help me get rid of the background of my dirt!!

Thank you :slight_smile:

EDIT: I’ve actually been here for a while, but never posted. So feel free to welcome me :slight_smile:

2

Read this:
http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-misc001.html

And this:
http://marginal.org.uk/x-planescenery/hangar_tutorial/4-transparency.html

You need the background of the dirt to be blank.

Also, you can add planes in front of your window with what you want on your window. Then use whichever plane works for which ever circumstance is in use at the moment.

Hope that helps, those tuts helped me a lot. I got them from the file that Ititrx has in her signature here on the forum.

3

Hihi!

The hangar-link was exactly what I was looking for. I’ll try out this later, and come back if I can’t get it to work.

Thank you :slight_smile:

4

You are very welcome. I understand how frustrating it can be learning new techniques.