I'm in the process of making a dresser with shelves. Upon one of the shelves I have a candle in a glass holder. I'm trying to make the glass transparent but am having problems when loading it in the game.

I've made the glass part of the texture image transparent in Gimp, saved it as a .png file, imported it into SimPE, and when I previewed the object in SimPE and UVMapper Pro, it looked fine. However, in game the glass colour is solid.

I've been reading various tutorials on the subject, both at MTS and other places, but most of them are very technical and not really suitable for a beginner like me.

Did you import the texture as DXT1? Because DXT1 doesn't support transparency; you have to use either DXT3 or DXT5.

Also, in the TXMT, the blend mode has to be set to "blend". And that should do the trick.

Hi, thanks for your reply. I did import the texture as DXT5 (more as a guess than anything!), but I'm not sure how to change the mode to blend. I'm new to this, and don't know my way around SimPE as yet!

Dxt 3 is good enough, Dxt just makes the package larger with no better texture quality.

http://www.hugelunatic.com/transp

Pictures shows where to change to blend mode.

Everything you want to know about transparency and blend mode : http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=316260 part 3

Thanks for the links, guys...I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I am slowly starting to get it.

Okay, I cloned a vase and decided to try some candles inside glass holders. I made the glass parts of the texture transparent, which has worked fairly well, but they look terrible as the candles stand out too much (please ignore the crude design, I want to get this right before I can think about aesthetics!):

Is the blend mode for the candles set to blend as well? Because the game doesn't like it when you have two (potentially) transparent subsets overlap, so if the glass blend mode is set to blend (which it of course has to be, since it's glass), then the candles' can't be as well. So the blend mode in the candle TXMT has to be set to none.

(You can still have part of the candles be transparent, but then they can't be opaque since you'll have to change a different variable.)

Well, thanks to the help from here and another site, and from an MTS subset tutorial, I finally managed it:


Thank you all!

Yay! Glad to hear you got it working!