Hi,

Is there a way to make the Fullbright shader take an alpha channel so that part of a mesh becomes invisible while the rest of it is rendered with Fullbright? The wiki lists an "AlphaMap" parameter, although I've not seen it in the MODLs I've looked at. I've tried adding that to a material definition and pointing it to the diffuse map, which is a texture with alpha channel that works with Phong (with AlphaMaskThreshold at 50.) I also tried different values of AlphaMaskThreshold for Fullbright. But all that happens so far is either the entire mesh becomes invisible, or the entire mesh is Fullbright.

Thanks!

EA and it's shaders is sometimes just confusing. I once had a CAS part creation that shared a glass shader and it all sunk to the ground because it wasn't correctly assigned to the bones (Which wasn't exactly true, it's just that CAS parts and glass shaders aren't a great idea) Anyway, S3PE seems to have a lot of options when it comes to Shaders and all, but so does TSRW. if you would load it into TSRW and go to the mesh tab and click on 'material' where you will see a button with 3 dots. Click that one. Now a window will pop up. But it seems that also TSRW only has the 'alphaMaskThreshold'. Do you first change the Shader in TSRW/S3PE and THEN edit the alphamaskthreshold or first the AlphaMaskThreshold and THEN change the shader? Sometimes it helped me to change the shader and then edit any needed settings.

Thanks for your reply!

I use S3PE because TSRW is very unstable on my setup. I changed the shader via Grid view in S3PE, and replicated all the parameters of a working Fullbright shader (from Flame Fruit), including AlphaMaskThreshold. From there it was straightforward to test different values of AlphaMaskThreshold, and to add a new parameter altogether (i.e. AlphaMap). Either way, I have no problems modifying the AlphaMaskThreshold. When it's set to 0, the entire mesh is Fullbright. Anything above 0 makes the mesh invisible.

Well after I replied on this post, I came across Pocci's blog where I got a better explanation on how shaders and AlphaMaskThreshold works. It seems that the reason that the mesh get's invisible is because if you would make 60 or higher (let just say any positive number would make it transparent) I'm not sure if it supports negative numbers, but something tells me that FullBright doesn't support alpha maps like Phong does.

I read Pocci's post about translucent curtains before opening this thread. It said that Phong Alpha appears to be the only shader to support alpha-based translucency. I was hoping that Fullbright would at least allow an all-or-nothing type of alpha, as I just want parts of the mesh to be completely invisible, not translucent. Not sure setting AlphaMaskThreshold to negative would be useful in this case, since Pocci stated that the darker the alpha mask, the lower the threshold should be. My guess is that a completely black alpha would be 0.

But it is working in some way it seems? But not in this 'lowering' way as it would with the Phong shader. Hmm... I guess there might be something in the Phong setting that the full bright doesn't seem to share.

In a way. It does pick up a change in AlphaMaskThreshold, but not in an incremental way like Phong Alpha. That is OK, though. The problem is that the shader seems to be applied to the whole mesh, instead of only to the parts dictated by the alpha channel. I guess Fullbright can only be applied to a whole mesh group at once? That would suck as the project I have in mind would be much lower poly if I'm able to implement it via a texture.

Hmmm... what if you seperate it into 2 groups? Giving this one part full bright and the other part phong and making it invisible? I'm not sure what you have in mind though so i'm not sure if this will be a good idea >-<

I thought about that but ultimately decided against it. The project I have in mind is a glow-in-the-dark wall decal for a child's room (and possibly a larger one for a science museum). Turning the texture's design into an actual mesh might require a high poly count, so I'd rather implement this via a texture. Plus, using a texture would make it easy to change or add designs later. Looks like this might not be possible though...