CS/Sprcal3d Texture Questions

[yoshi]

1. Recently, I've been working on texturing a model, and I've been experimenting with transparent textures for the model's hair.  I realize that if I don't use a base texture with alpha information in it, I would have to supply a black and white alpha map along with my base texture.  Eventually, I would also like to apply bump mapping to my meshes, so that would be 3 textures in all.

I was wondering if CS/the sprcal3d format supports such things, seeing as how all the .cal3d examples I've seen only account for one base material per object.

2. More importantly, I cannot seem to get transparent images to work with cal3d or CS' viewmesh.exe.  I use Blender 2.36, and after much work, I figured out how to use one png texture with alpha information to get a desired transparency effect.  However, when I export the object (which renders correctly in blender) using the cal3d export script and try to load it in viewmesh.exe, the program crashes before it loads.  When I use cal3d's own miniviewer program, it loads the mesh, but without any texture on it.

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks.

[yoshi]

All right, I have an update on my situation.

I got transparent textures to work (using PNGs with alpha information), so that's cool... I didn't do anything much differently than before.  Basically, I exported my model from blender with a bitmap version (with no alpha information) of the texture that I planned to use mapped onto the mesh. Then, later, in my .cal3d file, I specified the PNG version (with alpha information) of the texture, and it worked.

I noticed, though that CS doesn't render any faces that you should be able to see past the transparent portion of the texture.  In blender, this is rectified by enabling the "ZTransp" option for the selected material; is there a way to fix this in CS?

Also, I was wondering if CS supports two-sided textures/faces.  Or is it necessary to manually double-side a mesh (thus increasing the poly count)?

Also, I am still interested in an answer to the first question I asked (in my first post of this thread).

[dingobloo]

The Ztranps thing basically refers to the way that CS does it's priorities. the Alpha render priority needs to be set, not sure how this is done per-vertex though...