Claire Harford

If you haven't already visited my blog you might find the previous comments helpful for translating the video to GIMP. Multi Chan Hax- It's all kinds of awesome! Watch the video tutorial for using Multi Chan Hax up until it mentions the issue of the pixels stopping at the edge of the avatar mesh- then have a read through the following text. The Flaming Pear Solidify filter appears to be incompatible with the latest version of GIMP. The steps I’ve detailed below is as close as I can “translate” for now. Duplicate the “texture” layer and rename the lower layer “texture bleed”. Make sure you’re working on the “texture bleed” layer and go up to Filters >>> Blur >>> Blur. Duplicate this layer then merge the two “texture bleed” layers together. You might have to repeat the last two steps a few times (4-8 times depending on canvas size). So blur, duplicate, merge down, blur, duplicate, merge down and so on. That is pretty much all the solidify filter does by the way- it just does it much more aggressively using a few different algorithms and it works a helluvalot faster for an entire canvas than having to do it manually. As far as I know- there is no equivalent filter for GIMP that does the same kind of job. The process of blurring and merging down is a great tip for getting rid of the white halo effect in GIMP. Even with the “texture bleed” visibility turned off it should sample the colour from the layer beneath- but you want to leave it ON because we want more than just the 1 pixel anti-aliasing buffer. You want a decent and deliberate bleed area in this case. So after you’ve solved the dreaded “jaggies” and created a decent bleed area on the seams but you will still need to go in and manually clean up the upper edge to maintain any hard lines. So from here on you can just mask or erase what you don’t want to see. One way to do it would be to select the “texture” layer in the layers palette, right click and from the list that drops down choose “Alpha to Selection”. This will give you the same “marching ants” selection as what you can see in the video. With this selection active go up to Select >>> Grow >>> 4 pixels. Then switch back to your “texture bleed” layer, right click and select “Add Layer Mask”. A popup window will appear asking you what kind of mask you wish to create. Check the box for “Selection” then click the “Add” button. Now go up to Select >>> None (or control+shift+A) to deselect. GIMP works as a “what you see is what you get” editor when it comes to see transparency. It doesn’t have the same kind of alpha “channels” as Photoshop does, rather, it makes use of the layers transparency instead. I’m tempted to call it “visible transparency” but that seems a bit redundant, a bit like the phrase “free gift” (haha- sidetracked! sorry!). Moving along… all you need to do now is turn off all the layers you don’t want to see such as templates/backgrounds and leave your sock layers visible. If you can see the grey checkerboard where you want transparency- you’re good to go!

I'm running GIMP 2.6.8 with PSPI (PhotoShop Plug In), using TS3D_multichanhaxv1b on Win7 Pro SP1 and the preview window is currently working for me. I've listed all the pieces of the puzzle in the hopes of figuring out why it's picky with previews. Multi Chan Hax worked for me the first time I tried using it in GIMP but I may have been lucky. I ranted about it to another GIMP user on my friends list and she reported the black preview window. The weird thing was we were using the same version of GIMP, same OS, same MCH filter and files- but she saw a black preview window *sighs*. In the time between then and now I've seen MCH work and not work for me in GIMP on my own computer and there seems to be no logical reason why it happens. So the warning for non-photoshop users is that while it works, it might work strangely. For some reason the preview window sometimes doesn't show what it should. The filter still works when you apply it but you can't preview the results as you're flipping through the channels. To phrase that in a more positive way- while you can't preview the changes, you can still see the magic when you apply the settings. Abu, could it have anything to do with the DevIL.dll I grabbed for BendThis TBN? My first thought is "no" but I'm putting it out there as a "maybe". Any thoughts?