Looking a tutorial to make a custom part!

[Travis Cobbs]

Not sure about LDCad, though. I think the LDraw texturing spec makes it ambiguous about what the correct behavior is for the above. If LDCad has the texture's opacity match the underlying geometry, it won't show anything. If LDCad makes the texture itself fully opaque, it should match LDView.

The texture will become part of the underlying geometry, so it will indeed become invisible as a whole.

The ambiguity on this in the spec has come up before, but in practice I don't think you always want one or the other behavior. So we might need to make it an option somehow?

I'm not sure how to get the desired effect as wanted here using the fixed pipeline though, but I would certainly address it in the 2.0 engine.

I agree that being able to set the transparency of the texture independently of the transparency of the underlying geometry would be useful. LDView uses two passes to draw textures (which sometimes leads to texture static). The first pass draws the textured geometry in whatever color it might be, and the second draws just the texture. The texture pass uses the opacity from the alpha channel of the PNG file, but doesn't pay attention to the underlying geometry's transparency.

This is obviously not ideal, but even before LDView worked with textures on transparent geometry, that was the only way I could figure out to support both lit and unlit textures.