   D3D Transparent Textures
  What is the best way to implement transparent textures in D3D9? Bare in mind that I'm not too good with D3D9 but I'm looking to learn! From my limited knowledge, I believe there are two main options.1) Create the texture images in a format that supports alpha data and simply load and use the textures as normal (does this require any specific options when setting up D3D?). With this method: how can I 'draw' the alpha data onto an image in Photoshop 9? What would be the best file format to use (preferably one that is supported by D3DX texture loading functions!)?2) Create two separate images - the actual texture, and an image representing the alpha values for that texture. Would this method be better (better performance? better functionality?)? How could I go about implementing this method?I'm currently just doing some 2D demos but I'm going to be getting on to doing some 3D demos and learning various 3D graphics techniques.Thanks for the help!   
  Either method is good, but if you want to save memory (i.e. not loading in two textures and take advantage of things like run-length TGA compression), you should embed the alpha channel into the texture.In Photoshop this can be done by opening up the channels tab and adding a new channel. That channel will then become your effective alpha map and anything you paint on there will represent alpha values. From there you can export into most 32-bit image formats including TGA, PCX, and DDS. In order of preference I would reccommend DDS, TGA (with RLE), TGA, and then PCX.Hope that helped!   ;  Thats all I needed, thanks!   ;  Another alternative is to use colour keying, which is supported by the D3DX texture loading functions (E.g. D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx()). Then you just paint what you want to be transparent it one colour (usually magenta).   