Issue with texture transparency (weird artifacts)

[LilithServil]

Currently trying to edit some cheek fur to slap onto one of my avatars. I make a texture and....

What am I doing wrong?? The actual file looks like this.

Tried both png and tng. Alpha masking helps kind of get rid of it, but makes it super jagged when I want it to look soft. Not sure what else to do at this point.

[Rolig Loon]

You're going to have to use alpha blending, not alpha masking.  Alpha masking is not suited for partial transparency.  Its cutoff limit guarantees that anything below the limit is entirely transparent and anything above it is entirely opaque.  That's why you are getting harsh, jaggedy outlines.  There's also not much tonal variation across your texture, which adds to the problem. Create your texture by adding some range of gray values in the alpha channel, so that you actually generate variations in transparency rather than a uniform opacity, and then saving it as a TGA file

[LilithServil]

I'm aware of what alpha masking does; I stated it helps get rid of the outlines via masking, but makes it sharp for those reasons. Alpha blending is what's giving those outlines no matter what I do. I've tried colors/shading (even though I want it relatively flat for style reasons to make my avatar) and not much changes. :s

[Lindal Kidd]

What does the alpha channel of the file look like?

[LilithServil]

Alpha channel? I've been up for 18 hours so I'm a little out of it. There aren't any stray pixels causing it if that's what you're asking. Even scrapping it altogether and drawing a single white line on a transparent background gives me a jagged dark pixel line around it when I go to preview it.

 

Also forgot to state I'm using paint tool sai and not any form of photoshop or gimp, so if there's actually a way to check alpha stuff further in those... I likely can't do the same on my program.

 

The weird thing is, I've made plenty of semi transparent things before and haven't had this jagged outline issue.

[Lindal Kidd]

I'm not familiar with your software, sorry.  By "alpha channel" I mean the transparency channel of the image.  Images with transparency have values at each pixel for Red, Green, Blue and transparency, or RGBa.

Imaging programs like GIMP and Photoshop can show the individual channels.  An alpha channel might look like this:

[LilithServil]

Yeah unfortunately, my program doesn't have something like that as far as I know. I do know though that there shouldn't be any stray pixels like what's showing up on SL because the only thing on the canvas is what I directly drew, if that makes sense. I don't know if it has to do with how fine the lines are... if I erase everything and just draw a big fat smudge, there aren't any artifacts on SL. If I draw a fine line, suddenly there are clusters like what's shown in the image there.

[Christhiana]

It looks like the same problem as with white halos you sometimes get around edges on a partially transparent picture.

You could try and see if the method for correcting this also works for your issue.

Gimp: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/67704/how-to-get-rid-of-white-edge-artifacts-when-using-alpha-texture

Photoshop: http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/WhiteHalo.html

 

[Lindal Kidd]

I dunno...from your images, it looks like it's working just the way you've drawn it.  If you want a soft looking fur, you will need a lot more fine hair detail, and probably some blur and gradient.