I have recently started programming (managed) directx, and I am quite happy with it. Most things I can findout for myself, form books, google and msdn. But now I rean into a problem which none of these can help me with. Anyway to the point... Take a look at my 3d experiment so far I am trying to implement a simple UI, the arrows are to move the camera, and the other Icon is to rotate the camera. I already did that part, so everything is right about good. Except for the fact that the icons should have transparent parts. The icons are simple Transformed Textured quads (is it even possible to alpha blend those?), which get renderd last so they are on top. Steps I already took are the following: -First I made sure I used a texture format that has A8 (i used PNG first and dds later but should make no difference) -Then I double checked my render states. I use these now: RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable = True RenderState.AlphaSourceBlend = Blend.SourceAlpha RenderState.AlphaDestinationBlend = Blend.InvSourceAlpha dev.TextureState(0).AlphaArgument1 = TextureArgument.TextureColor dev.TextureState(0).AlphaArgument2 = TextureArgument.Diffuse dev.TextureState(0).AlphaOperation = TextureOperation.Modulate These where taken from the billboarding sample which renders correctly on my machine. Now there are a lot of different sources on the internet which deal with alpha blending and nearly all of them use different settings. Some (like the billboarding sample) also use alpha testing. What is it? Should i use that? (also I saw that all the other samples I looked at used lighting, but I haven''t learned that yet so I don''t use it, is that a problem?) I''ve spent a day or so trying to figure this thing out. so any help would be apreciated.

Alpha testing is often used with alphablending to skip pixels that are completely transparent. For example, most apps set alphatest up such that any pixels with an alpha < 8 are skipped. They''re not written to the backbuffer, or the depth buffer. Alphablending doesn''t need to be enabled for this to work, and you don''t need to use this to make alphablending work.

Lighting should only affect where the diffuse color and alpha come from. Since you''re trying to use the alpha from the texture, lighting isn''t a problem.

Everything else looks set up fine, so lets worry about your texture...

You''ve made a texture that has A8, BUT, did you put anything in the alpha channel? Does you paint package support alpha (ie: Photoshop defaults to 3 channels(RGB), but you can add another, for alpha.)

If your paint package doesn''t support it, look in your DX SDK for the texture tool. It will allow you to load one image in the color bits and another image into the alpha bits, then save that new image out.

Another simplistic option is in D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx, to pass an appropriate value for the color key. This takes any matching input pixel and turns it transparent black (beware of filtering problems this can introduce). To make you icons be transparent, try using 0xFF000000 (solid black) as your color key.

Well I did chech I have an alpha channel. That''s why I also tried DirectX''s texture format.

And as for the sort order, these quads are designed to be a sort of image overlay, so it was natural to assume they would have to be renderd last. Therefore, they already are.

Can anything else be wrong?

Perfect, this fixed my problem too. I am using CustomVertex.TransformedColored to make a console-like box that comes down. My console is now transparent yay. Thanks.

-- Trivex