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wishlist: automatic .png transparency support

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 2:44 am
by kwistenbiebel
Hi all,

At the risk beating a dead horse, I would want to ask whether rendering .png transparency is on the to do list for skindigo. I mean without having to point to clipmap textures.

I just ask as both Podium and Fryrender support it by now (Vray not yet afaik).

What do you think?

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 3:33 am
by CTZn
Hi kwistenbibel, you know I'm not a Skindigo user but I believe that the horse is rather not born yet !

Indigo won't read those images, if you tried already it would complain about pixel depth being inadequate. So using png with embedded alpha channel in Skindigo would mean splitting the images with a third party software afterwards in all cases, at least until Indigo supports transparent png's...

It's first about the renderer, the exporter follows.

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 5:51 am
by kwistenbiebel
Thanks for the clarification CTZn, that explains a lot.

[Nagging Mode:ON]: Can we have it Ono? PPPPlease? [Nagging Mode:OFF]

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 6:20 am
by crojack
It would make life easier, that is for sure!
I have system down but it is not smooth or quick, and takes a good knowledge of sketchup.

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 4:53 pm
by kellpossible
I agree with Kwinsten, this would be very useful, considering that a lot of the models on the 3d warehouse use png images with an alpha channel. And doesn't POV-Ray support them as well?

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 6:19 pm
by BBjam
What language is Skindigo written in? If there is an easy way to load a png in said language Skindigo should load png textures and then write out the alpha chanel to a png image and use that as a blend map with a null mat. It would not be hard to do in my native language, Java, but I don't know if it is possible in Skindigo.

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2009 9:14 pm
by Sir
so has anyone discovered a work around for this yet? you can see what happend to my trees yesterday below :roll:

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2009 9:42 pm
by kellpossible
at the moment you have to make a clip map for the trees by extracting the alpha map from the png and saving it as a black and white jpeg, then put that jpeg as external with the same uv coordinates as su(if your using the new version), or with the old version just load it into sketchup with the same uv coordinates. You might already know this, but I said how to just in case! :P

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 1:19 am
by Sir
thanks ill give it a try :shock: :D

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 2:38 pm
by kellpossible
try testing it on something simple first to see whether you can get the clip mapping working, then work your way up to something more complicated like your tree scene, that's what i've learned to do anyway!