Hello! I have been trying to make a bed with some transparent parts but I haven't been able to do it right. I have SimPE, NVIDIA DDS Utilities, Sims Homecrafter plus, GIMP, paint, and ArcSoft Imaging Suite, and whatever else I needed. I have successfully recolored clothes in Body shop, too. Can someone give me a step by step procedure on how to do recolors with transparencies? Thanks!

I would like to see your screenshots of your troubled transparent bed cover here, please.

MissMaranda,

Bedding on the Maxis bed has limitations regarding any transparent parts, because under the covers near the sim's shoulders they put some dark rectangles to block off the view down under the covers. So if you take away the covers, the dark part remains... limiting how much you can cut away and have things look right.

That said. To make an object semi transparent *OR* alpha friendly (one will cut with a sharp b&w alpha but will not go semi transparent) these are the steps I find work best

1) build your graphic in PNG format with the actual areas you want erased erased/transparent. If you want a semi-transparent effect, take your layer(s) in your program and set their opacity down before saving your png file.

2) Make your recolor, import the texture using dxt 3 or higher. Sometimes I found I had to go higher - that one size looked fine, but smaller sizes of the graphic (you can look at the graphics or look at the object in game) got very fuzzy and had a mess around the edge of my alpha.

3) change these two settings in the matd

For something that has semi-transparent parts:

stdMatAlphaTestEnabled 0
stdMatAlphaBlendMode blend
(you need to check your display to see if it behaves well in game, sometimes in this mode you'll find that parts bleed into each other, like a door and doorframe will display oddly at certain angles, at which point these settings will not work.)

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For a simple on/off alpha:

stdMatAlphaTestEnabled 1
stdMatAlphaBlendMode none
(good for things like cutting new shapes out of boblishman's flag, for instance, or the cutouts in lethe's elven bedroom headboards)