Texture Question

How do i allow a texture to use it's alpha channel? So i can allow transparency through glass windows in the texture, rather then putting a hole in the wall. I save it as a compressed texture w/ alpha channel, but in the .vmt, what code do i put in to allow the use of the alpha channel? I know $alphatest makes it fully transparent (I think, it's been a while since i used that one)

$translucent 1

Awesome, Is there a way to add transparency without adding an alpha layer to the texture? In the .vmt?

"$alphatest" 1
Alphatesting: Every pixel with an alpha value less than 178 will be completely transparent ingame. (However, values close to this value will confuse the shader at distances.) This type of shading costs much less than translucent shading [1]

"$alpha" float
Scales material opacity by the 'float' number.


taken from the valve developer community

So, I'll use this vmt as an example,
"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "Brick/brickfloor001a"
"$surfaceprop" "brick"
"%keywords" "c17downtown"
"$alpha" "90"
}

Would make it 90% transparency?

your guess is as good as mine

Haha, thanks, i'll check it out when later tonight. Will update later with the results.

10-4 roger wilco

Well, I tried adding
"$alpha" 70
or
"$alpha" "70"
or
"$translucent" "1"
"$alpha" "70"
or
"$translucent" 1
"$alpha" 70

to the files, and nothing happened on any of those combos. tried putting alpha before and after translucent, to no avail
I found this somewhere.....
"Proxies"
{"Sine"
{"resultVar" "$alpha"
"sineperiod" 1
"sinemin" 0.80
"sinemax" 0.80
}
}

That works, makes it 20% transparent, BUT, it bugs out alot, making the texture completely invisible. So at certain distances, it makes it so i can see all the way through to the outside bounding box, passing everything else.

I think they mean percentages:

"$alpha" "0.5"
for a half-transparent texture...

But I'm not sure of this, try it!!