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[Old Codger]

I really need the community's help here. I NEED to be able to put white into a texture and have it show up. I need to put white lettering onto a material of a much different color. I also very much need to put flags and decals (safety warnings and other things) with some color in the primary shape and white lettering.

I work in Photoshop Elements for my textures and so am comfortable doing layered files and saving them as a transparent gif. I tried starting with a transparent background but the white lettering doesn't show up. I also tried having a pure white background color (RGB 255-255-255) with lettering slightly darker (245-245-245) and the "white" lettering sort of shows up but only as a slightly different version of the background.

HELP!!!! I can (pretty much) make the shapes I want and I can easily apply black lettering to whichever faces I desire. I can even put a "decal" on a face where/how I want. I just cannot put a decal with a base color and white lettering on a face. I need to put flags onto the sides of vehicles and the flags have white areas - either a white field or white stars (such as on a U.S. national flag). Please help me. This is stymieing multiple projects.

Here is the flag I need to apply to a model:

[Steve]

If the flag shape doesn't match the shape of the faces that you apply it to then there will be some problems around the edges. On way around that is to use a texture with an alpha channel. .GIF and .PNG formats support an alpha channel. Make a large blank area surrounding the flag with alpha set to 0 (transparent). Make a texture with that and set the blend mode to DECAL, alpha mode to LAYER. Then use the UV tool in the point editor to move the image where you want it. Here's a simple example of a sphere with the flag as a decal.

[Old Codger]

Thanks for the reply, Steve. I am beginning to think I have something wrong with how I have Anim8or configured. Reason? I saved your gif file to textures, saved your .an8 project file to models and then opened the project file.

Below is a quick screen shot of the result: (which is entirely consistent with what I have been getting all along but INconsistent with what I would expect.)

[Old Codger]

Just for grins and giggles, I changed the RENDERER from Open GL to ART Ray Tracer and suddenly I got the following result. It still looks off in the workspace but it seems to render okay. What is happening, Steve. You are the wizard of all things graphic. I am but a lowly journeyman (possible) level modeler. Could it be that simple?

[Claude]

Menu: View/Viewport preferences Shading
Select Use shader. GLSL if you can.
If not ,ARB. If none ,you're out of luck.

[Old Codger]

Thank you, Claude. All it took was setting the view preferences to "Use Shaders" and voila there it was. I had the feeling it was more a configuration issue. I was even able to go back to Renderer preferences and use Open GL for rendering.

But that makes everything work okay.

[Steve]

Thanks, Claude. The GLSL shaders are more capable and you should normally be using them.

[2020 Hindsight]

Has anyone played with the wave script for flags?