Why would the backlighting tab be greyed out on a material ?

Specifically an X-Frog leaf... Vue 6 Infinite.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Because backlighting for double sided polygons was only enabled at version 7. If you want backlighting in Vue6, you need to check one-sided first, but you'll most likely get shading errors.

HA,

I shoulda titled it..hey bruno whats the deal with this. i knew you would be the one to answer it,cause your all things Vue. LOL

But seriously, i never had this problem before. and I been doing this a while.

So why would an Xfrog leaf come in weird ? Is it the lightwave format i used ?

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Nah, it's the backlighting thing on original double sidede polyd modified to one sided. Sometimes, shadows are wrong, and sometimes, there is a cut in the geometry, whatever the import format. And sometimes it works too...

well, I have never had any problems with X-Frog models...look at this WTF ?!?

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Yuk! Looks like the transmap didn't import, and the colour map is really ugly.... Is this with backlighting? Does it look normal without backlighting?

well, it appears in the material editor that the transmap imported, but it doesent look like it in the render. this iw with backlighting yes, but also it looks like this without. I am thinking since this is the first time i have used .lwo and it is the first time i have come across this issue they are somehow linked (. I am going to try again when i get the kids to bed.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

I always used lwo when exporting from Xfrog 3.5, and the transmap always came out well. Maybe it's a file format issue? png or something?

It is certainly possible to backlight two-sided textures in older versions than Vue 7!!!
I've done so many times in old Vue 5 (with XFrog and Onyxtree bitmaps).
But if you do it "by the book", it can't be done. That's also true.

Demonstration: Load an XFrog tree. Make a duplicate.
Change the leaf material for one of the trees only, to see the difference.
What you need, is to make the texture "one-sided" to access the backlight slider. Type e.g. 250 pct. just to see the effect.
Then make the texture "two-sided" again. And - voila, backlight bitmap foliage.
Now, for real use, 250 pct. is probably too much, but for the effect to be functional, use more than 100 pct. It takes a little more for the effect to work in this "impossible" way.

(To my knowledge, I'm the only one who figured this out, and Linda "frenchkiss" the only person here that I've shared it with, long time ago. She was baffled. - However much Bruno and others (no offense intended) may object to it, it works. Try it.)

Lars "bigbraader"

sounds interesting. I will give it a whack. I am using Vue 6 infinite.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

I certainly don't want to object if it works. When I tried it, it just didn't.Now I've never tried your method, since I wasn't aware of it, and  I deleted Vue6 a long time ago, so I won't  be able to give it a go.