[Arcanthur]

I've thought about this in the past but haven't really said much about it. This would bring about so many new skinning possibilities.

Essentially what I'm looking for is the ability to use an invisible texture to overlay opaque ones. So you could say use it in a group:

group
mask
texture
texture
texture
/group

Doing such you could animate the mask for instance to give some nice effect. Also if you could somehow use a gradiated mask this would give us the ability to overlay text to fade it properly etc.

I'll create an example graphic if needed, as I doubt I'm explaining it properly.

[jmarshall]

This is quite difficult to achieve, as the diffuse is multiplicative (it uses multi-texturing) so needs the same coordinates of the other textures. You can easily do that with an actual texture though (essentially you split the "background" texture into two, one below the text, one above it, with the one above it semi-transparent to do the "fading"). Ofcourse, it restricts what is in the background.

[MassIV]

I think he wants to also move the negative space (or mask) independently inside/over an image. Where now, it is always attached. +1 btw.
Also, double backgrounds and large diffuses get heavy pretty fast.

For text it would just be a nice start to be able to input two hex values for a simple top-bottom gradient.

[Arcanthur]

I think he wants to also move the negative space (or mask) independently inside/over an image. Where now, it is always attached. +1 btw.
Also, double backgrounds and large diffuses get heavy pretty fast.

For text it would just be a nice start to be able to input two hex values for a simple top-bottom gradient.

Right, to be able to move the mask independently is one thing that this would benefit from. Being able to add animation controls to the diffuse and have the underlying layers get effected. You could also have a multiimage diffuse.

Also, it would solve issues when working with slightly transparent textures, or when you want to overlay fanart. Currently the only way is to cheat by copying a section of the background layer and putting it over the ones that need masking.

I'm sure the solution isn't an easy one, but it's a feature that would definitely give rise to a lot of neat effects. If anyone wants to try tackling it, I would definitely put it to use, and I'm sure others would as well once they see the benefit.

[jmarshall]

It's definitely not easy. Basically it would require a couple things:

1. It would only be possible on a control group. That restricts it to a single "overlay" type multiplication.
2. To do it we'd need to render all controls within a group to a separate texture, then render the overlay using multitexturing.
3. There'd be some restrictions on placements of controls can be within a group with 2 (essentially they'd be completely bounded by the group's bounds) which currently aren't in place.

Note that 2 and 3 might be a good thing. It would allow for other effects at the group level such as desaturate/blur etc. which just aren't practical (and usually aren't desirable) at a per-control level. It would also make transparent overlaying more correct (e.g. if you have 2 opaque controls that overlap and want to fade them in, you see the bottom + top controls mixed in the overlap while they fade in, whereas you should only see the top control as it's opaque).

Not something I'll be working on, but happy to support someone else.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Hitcher]

Does that mean it would solve the current problem when using diffuses for reflections of overlapping images getting blended into each other?

[jmarshall]

Only if they were all part of the same group. I don't think this would be the case if the reflections are overlapping by being in a list (each item is in it's own group?)