Subject: Re: Decals
From: [email-masked] (Bill Mills)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 12:19:41 PDT

Re: Kim Stickler wanting to map a decal on a clear object.

It's a snap.  Take your bitmap for the decal, and fill it in with black
where you want the surface to be clear, and white where you want the decal
to show.  You can also use intermediate gray levels to anialiase any jaggies
around the irregular shape.  You will probably want to reduce the size of
the pallete on this image (I'f you don't have ADPro, get it) and then 
save it under another name (like filename.transmap).  Then, in layout, map
your decal on the surface, load the .transmap image as well.  Select 
the texture mapping in the transparency item on the surface menu, and map
the transparency map image in the same way and scale as you did the decal
image.  Viola you are done.

The grey level of any one pixel (from 0-255) in your transparency map
image will determine the surface transparency at that point on the object.
On the texture mapping menu you will have some options like negative (If you
use white where you want the transparency to be) and anti-aliasing.  I 
usually anti-aliase my transparency map first, and then turn this option
off, so that LightWave has a little less work to do when rendering.  Of course
if the bitmap is small, and will appear large on the rendered image, I turn
the anti-aliasing on.

Be seeing you...
-Bill Mills

[email-masked]
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