Paintshop Pro 5 Alpha Tutorial

Hi there, first off I must say I am not a pro at this, but I figured out how to do it so I thought I would share it.

There are many short cut keys for making this go faster but I used the window pull down things for this tutorial.

First you will need a texture that you want to make a alpha channel for, I am using this one   that I made for  my Quake3 level.

Now you want the black part to disappear in the game well that's what alpha channels can do.

So lets select the black part by using the magic wand. Press the shift key and hold as you left click with the wand on all black areas.

Now it should look like this

Notice I used RGB mode tolerance of 0 in the tools control.

Now that is done easy huh.

Lets invert the selection.

Also easy huh.

Now we need to save this to the alpha channel.

Then this comes up.

You can name the channel anything I used alpha1.
you could call it grate if you want. Click ok. Now that was also easy huh.

Now its time to save this texture to a .tga format
Go to file then save as then this widow opens up.


Notice I have already made a subfolder in my baseq3/texture folder called raptors_tex this is were I want the texture
Now all I have to do is fire up Q3radiant and use this texture.

Looks like this


Don't forget to include you new textures in your pk3 files.
You also need to make a shader file to make it work right.
Don't worry it's not that hard.
All I did is opened a shader for one of id. grate texture and copied it and changed the texture names.

This is the shader I made:

textures/raptors_tex/rap_grate_11
{
surfaceparm metalsteps 
cull none

// BILL BROOKS GRATE THAT CAN BE SEEN FROM BOTH SIDES
{
map textures/raptors_tex/rap_grate_11.tga
tcMod scale 2.0 2.0
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ZERO
alphaFunc GE128
depthWrite
rgbGen identity
}
{
map $lightmap
blendFunc GL_DST_COLOR GL_ZERO
depthFunc equal
rgbGen identity
}
}


Also once you save (thename.shader)  file add that name to your shader list this can be found in your baseq3/scripts folder. Once you are ready to pk3 your shader file change the name to your ( thename. pk3) name but use (thename.shader) 

I hope I didn't lose ya there toward the end.

Now go make some textures and make mine look like crap. Ok