Mini Tutorial: Invisible Recolors

[hat_plays_sims]

It's easier than you'd think to make an invisible object recolor. About half these steps, I picked up from a Lord Darcy tutorial, the rest was from a HugeLunatic tutorial. I figured it was about time to put 'em all in one place.

Start as though making a nice, normal recolor, but substitute a clear .png file of the appropriate size for your largest image. Use Build DDS on DXT3 or DXT5 to maintain transparency.

If you’re lucky, that’s all you need to do. Test your recolor.

Got funky white shiny bits or weird solid black bits? Then you need to look at the TXMT.

Set Reflectivity to 0.0 (or 1)...

Set stdMatAlphaTestEnabled to 1

And stdMatEnvCubeMode to none.

Commit, save, test again.

That should do it!

If it doesn’t?

Set stdMatAlphaBlendMode to blend (lower case B is important)…

Still stuck?

Set stdMatUntexturedDiffAlpha to 0

That has worked on everything I've tried so far. On certain objects, like the OFB crafting tables or Bon Voyage massage tables, some features are attached and would require either cloning or default replacing to change at all.

Comments

Re: A few questions about fixing those black bits.

[hat_plays_sims]

I'm glad you got them fixed, and definitely sorry I was slow! I'll have to check out that thread-- I got back into the swing of the internet just as the holidays really got rolling and that does not make for keeping up with anything.