I've been trying to get alpha channel transparency in my textures. Currently, i'm attempting to do a color.rgb*color.a in my pixel shader. For some reason, this ONLY works when i specify a color key when loading the texture, AND it's the correct color key in the file. Shouldn't there be a way to do this alpha value in a shader w/o having to do all the color keying and renderstate modes? OpenGL can do it, so i know DX Can... ~Main

1) Does the texture file have an alpha channel ? (e.g. in a format such as TGA or PNG with an alpha/opacity/transparency channel set up)

2) Are you sure the texture is being loaded into a format which actually has a usable alpha channel? (e.g. D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8 rather than D3DFMT_X8R8G8B8 or D3DFMT_R5G6B5).

3) The information you've provided is a bit vague. Could you provide some more information about: how exactly you're loading and creating your textures, the format and contents of the texture image file, and maybe the actual code of your shader(s)

Quote:Original post by duhroach
I've been trying to get alpha channel transparency in my textures. Currently, i'm attempting to do a color.rgb*color.a in my pixel shader.

For some reason, this ONLY works when i specify a color key when loading the texture, AND it's the correct color key in the file.

Shouldn't there be a way to do this alpha value in a shader w/o having to do all the color keying and renderstate modes?

I don't get your point. If you don't set a colorkey while loading the texture, then it'll be all alpha=1 (Or is it a transparent png or tga?), in which case your shader will be multiplying color.rgb by 1 always.
It seems to me like I'm missing something...

texture is a .tga with an alpha channel (RGBA8888)
I'm loading it with format D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8.

What I'm getting at is this: Is their a way to do transparency w/o a color key?

I fully understand the concept of "magic pink" becoming a transparent color when using keying.

What I'd like to do is, rather than have a boolean transparency (clear or opaque via color key), is be able scale the transparency of the RGB pixels by the Alpha channel of my texture. So we don't use a boolean color key at all.

is their a way to do this? Or does DX only allow for color keys?

~Main

Did you enable alpha blending? And set the blending factors appropriately?

Quote:Original post by duhroach
texture is a .tga with an alpha channel (RGBA8888)
I'm loading it with format D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8.

...
What I'd like to do is, rather than have a boolean transparency (clear or opaque via color key), is be able scale the transparency of the RGB pixels by the Alpha channel of my texture. So we don't use a boolean color key at all.

Well, as with OpenGL, "color.rgb*color.a" will scale the *brightness* of the colour based on the value alpha channel, it won't affect the *transparency* of the rendered pixels (unless you had an additive frame buffer blend set up, but that's a different issue).

What it sounds like you're after is *frame buffer blending*, which controls how the rendered pixels from your currently rendered polygon interact with pixels from previously rendered polygons.

I'd suggest looking at the following section of the DirectX SDK docs:

Programming Guide ->
Getting Started ->
Direct3D Rendering ->
Alpha Blending ->
Frame Buffer Alpha


The most common frame buffer blend for transparent rendering is:

SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND, D3DBLEND_SRCALPHA);
SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND, D3DBLEND_INVSRCALPHA);

which performs a linear interpolation between colour of the pixel you're rendering and the existing pixel in the frame buffer using the value in the alpha channel to control how much of each is visible (i.e. alpha blending):

destRGB = (srcA * srcRGB) + ((1-srcA) * currentRGB)