I basically want to create a placeable which has some see-through places on the texture, but I cant find any documentation on how to accomplish that. Where would I look to find this out?
Specifically, the top of a chair I’m trying to import has cutouts that should be like so:
I use paint.net, to cut out certain parts of the texture. Just point with the magic wand on the space you want o make transparent (hopefully it has a bit of a different colour), adjust the tolerance and press delete. Done.
But in your case, I don’t think this will work. Those holes seemingly aren’t simple transparent spaces on a flat surface. The borders of the holes seem to be 3 dimensional. The rear side is set a bit apart from the front.
Again, I am no content creator for NWN1. Usually does is done through image masking in the alpha channel of the texture - mainly the diffuse texture. Import the texture file NWN uses to an image editing software and look at the channels. You should see a black and white (or fully black; fully white) image.
Alpha masking is used in older games to display fine details, like carvings in a chair from your example or foliage, fences, grates, etc. This way one can use a flat polygon to show such details. Remember that you need another polygon with flipped normals on the other side to display the texture there too.
What Mmat said is true only for a really prominent object in the center of a camera shot. Nobody will zoom in on a chair to notice that the details are just a flat texture.
I paint the alpha layer in black and white and then make it visible in photoshop before saving in TGA (conversion to DDS later).
The placable will display the transparency (or not, rather)
alpha
But like Mmat, I don’t think it will work for this chair.
