*You should now have an all black channel named “Alpha
1”. If you were to save the image
now, it would be invisible in-game because any black area on this alpha
channel becomes transparent. So lets
make the areas of the image that we want shown white (opaque).
-Select your paint bucket tool, set your foreground color
to white, uncheck "Contiguous" and click on your image.
*You should get (Figure 6).
Saving...
-Now deselect and go to the “File” and select “Save As”.
-Browse to where you want it saved, change the file extension
to Targa (.tga), make sure the Alpha Channel checkbox is checked.
-Name it what you want and hit save. When the Targa Options
popup shows itself select 32 bits/pixel and make sure Compress (RLE) is
unchecked, like (Figure 7)
-Open it up in your editor. First we have to make
sure the dimensions of your image are a power of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,
64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc). Go to
“Image”, “Image size”, and look at the pixel dimensions. If these are
not a power of 2, they need to be changed.
*Example 1:
If the image size is simply a square (i.e. 300x300), then we can just easily
change these to be a power of 2 (i.e. 256x256). Make sure that "Constrain
Proportions" is checked, then set one of the dimensions to a
valid power of 2 (if constrain proportions is checked, it will change the
other one for you), and hit OK.
*Example 2:
If, like (Figure 9), it isn't square and you would like to
accurately squash/stretch the image, then it'll take a little more work.
Go to “Image”, “Canvas Size” look at the dimensions (Figure
10), and increase the smaller one to equal the highest one (i.e. you have
280x310, increase the 280 to 310 to make a square, so now your canvas size
is 310x310). Hit OK. Now that your
image is a square, follow Example 1.
Note: There are many
possibilities with changing dimensions. Example: you have an image 240x210.
Well you can either change the canvas size to 256x256 so your actual
image will stay the same size, or you can make your canvas 240x240, then
change the image size to 256x256, but by doing it this way, it will stretch
to be bigger and you might not like it anymore.
Its up to you to get it the way you want.
Do your thing if you want to edit how the actual texture
looks. Once it's to your satisfaction we now need to create the alpha layer.
-Select the “Channels” tab and create a new channel (see
above). Now click on the box to the left of the RGB channel so that all the
channels have an “eye” next to them, this will make your image look a bit
weird but is perfectly normal.
-Click on the “Alpha 1” channel to highlight it (Figure
11). Now just paint white on the
areas of the image that you want to be opaque.
*In WoW, areas that are red will be transparent.
*If you want to get fancy you can use shades of grey to make
areas translucent. The lighter the
grey the more opaque, and the darker the grey the more transparent.
(Figure 12 & 13)
*You can use all your normal tools, pencil, paintbrush, paint
bucket, gradient. Go wild ;']
