I am with FLAME CZE on that one. I've tried for several hours and I was only able to do either completely clear or not clear. No shading/tinting was possible.
I suggest use clear windows on the rest of the car instead of trying to make the roof the impossible tint. There's a nice clear windows mod these days. http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=49661
But what about UF1_ExperimentALPHA skin? It's not clearly transparent, when i change the colour ingame, car colour changes too. I've opened that skin with photoshop, and it's not all black, there is a huge gray spot in the center of the skin. I'll try to c/p that on XRT roof, when i'll come back home
The experiment was a secret test that went wrong. Ended up with a neon-light-tube-powered car - pic
It's not a grey spot, it's a grey block 128x128 saved in a special format.
But I cannot remember what file format I used to save it. I used some bizaar dds format.
Edit: the file format was dds >> Cx V8U8 Norm (16 bit, normal map) in Photoshop
BUT, no matter what patterns or alpha channels I make, the whole skin comes out fluro neon-tube white colour.
yea but on the inside it would be like normal and you could only really do the back windshield or all the rest, maybe parts of each, but honestly i don't think it would look right at all, at least not like the pic.sorry
I did a gradient transparency across the whole skin, there is a threashold level and it goes from black to transparent. I wasn't able to make it tinted.
I've tried different levels of transparency in some other dds files (not skins) and they worked just fine, so these should also work in the same way. If you look in the alpha layer, different shades of gray give different transparencies. White gives no transparency, and black gives full transparency. Try it yourself, it works for me...
As an example, check out the alpha layer of XFdialsALP24.dds, you can see the different shades of gray which give different levels of transparency to the gauge background.
3rd or 4th time I've said now, it doesn't work, yes they are DDS's , BUT the skins come out different, because they are handled differently in LFS I believe. A skin never needed to have multiple levels of transparency so it was never implemented IMO. Something like windshields requires tinting so LFS renders it with transparency levels. Some command is sent to DirectX or something. Same does not happen with skins.
Here, I'll show you why. I have tried a skin with transparency gradient. It just stops the transparency (clear) as soon as the black changes to any grey at all.
Before anyone else says it can be done, please post proof.
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This is how it turns out:
Skin preview (preview of the image editor so you can see the transparency)