Making sections disappear

[UKVoodoo]

A bit of a weird and possibly very daft question but can you paint a section of an aircraft ie like an external fuel tank, or rockets and make it disappear or seem invisible while flying??

Cheers
Matt

[OBIO]

The short answer is YES...but it depends on how the plane is set up in terms of how it uses the ALPHA channel. If the plane is set up with simple specular shine, then applying a black alpha channel to mask the unwanted parts, saving them as DXT3, will make the parts invisible...though they will still cast a shadow on the ground (the shadow we see is actually a dedicated level of the MDL file and not actually generated by the sim...or that's how it is in CFS2 anyhow). If the plane is set up to use reflective textures...then using an alpha channel to make the part invisible will not work since reflective texturing uses the alpha channel to dictate how reflective a surface is.

OBIO