Eleina

Welp I've been working on re-skinning my UI for a while now, but I'm running into problems. I can't seem to edit the .tga files and leave parts of them transparent. The result of this is that all the hp/sta/exp meters are solid black and won't fill with the correct color. It also means that when I hover my mouse over my compass, the entire thing turns black. A few other annoying little quirks, but those are the biggies. I was looking around through here for someone who asked this question, and couldn't find anything. I'm assuming it's after I save the .tga files, the 'black' part of them not being transparent any more, but not sure. I use photoshop regularily. Can someone tell me how to correct this?

Raldor

I'll tell you how I've had to do it. Make your image in photoshop with the background truly transparent. When you are ready to save it as a tga, don't flatten it, but instead choose "merge visible" from the same menu where flatten is. This will condense all your layers into 1, but still leave them floating on top of a transparent background.

After you've done that, hold down control and click on they layer in the layers panel. This should select everything. Go to Select-->Save selection on the main menu. Click Ok without changing anything in the dialog box. This should save an alpha channel under your channels panel. If you click on it, you should see white wherever your images are and black everywhere else.

Now save your file as a psd, and then save it as a tga. Open your tga in photoshop and see if it has the alpha channel in it. If it does, great, you're ready to use the file, but mine never does. This is why I keep it as a psd also. Now you should have both files open. Just drag your alpha channel from the psd over and drop it right on the tga picture. That should really add it. Save the tga again, close it and open it again to make sure it's really there this time. It should be there and you're ready to use it.

Just a note: my tga files always end up with a white background as opposed to the EQ files which have black but it doesn't seem to matter since it's transparent anyway.

I hope this makes sense.

Eleina

Hmf, that makes a lot of sense. I was trying to save the alphas as TGA's but I never went back to check and make sure they were still there, this helps a lot. Much appreciated!! )