> Then make a new surface by snapping to it.

I don't think you need to create a new surface, because a PictureFrame is already just a plane with a texture map set on it - you can go in and edit the texture map settings, etc.. it's just a normal object where the texture map property gets filled in. The command is just kind of an aid for drawing a plane with the aspect ratio of that image.


> Then assign a texture, and also put a second image into the transparency channel.

I tried doing this by just setting the transparency map to the same image. But this didn't seem to work - I guess the transparency map does not read alpha from an image but instead probably is intended to take a grayscale image and use the intensity as the transparency?

So I guess there is another step in here where you have to strip the alpha channel out of an image and put it as its own separate grayscale image and then use that as the transparency map?


> I also just realized that if the environment mapping and the gloss finish are
> set to zero, then the image will not be affected by shadows & lighting.

I couldn't seem to get these to do this - I think the gloss is specular highlights, which are added in addition to regular light shading, so that doesn't turn lighting off. If you put an environment map on an object, that does turn lighting off, but it also turns the texture map off as well. You need to turn lighting off but leave the texture map on.

What would work is an ambient light setting, you would crank the ambient light all the way to white and that would provide full lighting at all spots. But there doesn't appear to be a per-object setting for ambient lighting...


It's a bit easier to just support the alpha! :)

- Michael