im working on a map that needs some spicing up with foliage and cover and plants to look at (its a forest map) so i made some foliage textures and filled in the see through areas where the player is supposed to be able to see through with blue. the problem is when i compile it the blue is visible and is black. naturally this looks very ugly. is there any way to make this 'black' part of the texture which should be invisible disappear? im new to mapping and despite being fairly lucky i've hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, this being one of them.

if you can help i'd be very thankfull. i hope i gave enough info, if not, ask me what i'm talking about or something.

that's because your texture begins with an "{". If you want it to be visible you need to apply an entity(func_wall or func_illusionary) and set following values:

Render mode: Solid
Fx amount: 255

this should do it. But I recommend using models if you want bushes and all that.

alright it worked, thanks..

now i just have one more problem, sometimes i get bad surface extente error or something like that and it's on the texture i made, what causes this and what can i do to fix it?

bad surface extent on a texture you made?

ok first thing is check ur image palete is 255 colours. less houldnt be a prob but HL is picky

next make sure your image dimensions are exponents of 2. 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,356,512,1024,etc

then check the actual face properites. make sure you've aligned the texture to world or face.

then the final step is checking the brush isnt an error.

here's what HLCC shows when it runs into the error
Error:
for Face 4026 (texture {grassfield) at
(-320.000 -1280.125 -256.000) (-320.000 -1281.000 -256.000)
(-320.000 -1281.000 -210.000) (-320.000 -1280.125 -210.000)
Error: Bad surface extents (14231 x 9)

are those .125 causing the problem? cause if they are im gonna scream. and what does 14231x9 mean? is that the dimensions of the texture face thats causing the problem? cause im pretty sure i haven't made any with those dimensions...

Open Wally then open the texture {grassfield then click one time on the ReMip image icon (bottom left toolbar). See if that helps.

yay i got it to work! even though it seems 1 pixel from the bottom of the foliage is overlapping to the top...

but if i fit it to face its still there and if i shrink it one unit it doesn't compile, so oh well guess i have to live with it until i feel like making a new grass textrue

thanks for all the help guys!

You should apply NULL texture on all faces of the foilage brush except for the front and back where players will be viewing it.