Hey obsidian?

[Magnus]

I figured you would be the one to ask about this one....

Any ideas on how to punch a small hole in a tinfx shader on a bots forearm so an underlying shader will show through?


You might rember the bot I am working on. Its the Savagephantom bot.
You once told me that I should do something with him so that he is more noticeable so I added a scrolling shader on his arm that stood out very well.
If you rember him he has a Q3A icon on his chest, glowing red eyes. and a knife on his right boot.

The problem is as you have seen he looks kinda dull. So I applied the tinfx shader and it totally covered up everything! The Q3A simbol on his chest, the shader on his arm, his eyes, even his boots and knife on his right boot.

Heh! It kinda looked like I dipped his whole body in wet paint..lol.

So I tried to create a texture that was faded and partially alpha to use with the tinfx shader. Hopeing that the alpha would cause the stuff that was being covered up to show through. but instead the tinfx shader was now being allpied under the dull skin I made for him.
So I made all of the black of his skin alpha and left only the Q3A icon on his chest, his eyes, his boots and his knife.
I then created a more solid dark texture for the tinfx shader to use and it almost worked.
Nowyou can see his eyes, Q3A icon on his chest, boots and knife, and he looks shiny, but the scrolling shader that was on his arm is now covered up because the tinfx shader is appling on top of the protogorre shader.
I wish there was a way to punch a small hole in the tinfx shader right where that one spot on his forearm is so the protogorre shader would show through.

Any ideas?

Thanks again!

[obsidian]

Shaders work using "stages", kind of like layers. You can layer different textures on top of one another to produce specific effects. The order that you are layering the textures is represented by the order of each texture stage within the shader file. You blend between layers using blendFunc. Generally you have blend, add and filter.

To do what you want, you will need to place your textures in the correct order. For the bot's skin, you will probably need an alpha-channel so that parts of it are transparent (the "hole" in his arm).

Seeing how you are new to shader writing, I recommend that you look through some of the default Q3 shaders. It should give you a very good idea of what you need to do.

Also, check out Q3ASE (Quake 3 Arena Shader Editor). It's a neat little program by Bert Peers that allows you to create shaders while allowing you to see the changes on the fly. You can even load a md3 model into the program for previewing.
http://www.bpeers.com/software/q3ase/