I think it might need to be a separate object with a separate material. It would follow then that everything under that material will shade at the same alpha level. So you wouldn't be able to draw windows or anything into a texture with an alpha channel using an eraser tool.Ares wrote:focusing crystal might not have been the right term.... but just a large transparent lens type emitter thing. just use a alpha channel perhaps?
I might be operating on old information with this however, since chuck and klauss have done alot of work on shaders and the graphics engine in general. They might have added support for alpha channel within textures, or they might have decided to use that channel for something else for sake of efficiency, which would not have been a bad call, imho.