Alpha Channel Issues

**DisgruntledGoat** · 04-11-2007, 23:40

I've been playing around with skinning (mainly with the italo-norman units) and I decided to change one of the masked helmets into a helmet with a nose guard. Since the mask already uses an alpha channel I thought it would be no problem. Well I was wrong. Here's a pic of the problem:

The red circles show where the alpha channel is doing something wierd. In the texture the alpha channel goes right to the edge yet once in game there is a thick section un-alpha'd (which gets worse the farther you pull back). Yet on the other mask no issue is noticeable. I also alpha'd out the cloth belts but they suffer from the same issue at a distance (bits of black show up). I can't figure out whats wrong, the alpha channel is fine. I am beginning to wonder if the converter (dds to texture) is messing it up. Does anyone have any thoughts?

**alpaca** · 04-12-2007, 00:00

I don't think the converter could be responsible for that - if it was, other stuff wouldn't work correctly, either.
Could you post a pic of the alpha and RGB channels of your texture and the normal map?

**DisgruntledGoat** · 04-12-2007, 00:13

Sure

**alpaca** · 04-12-2007, 00:47

Hmm weird indeed.
Could you try making some stuff invisible (the eyes or so) and see how that works?

**DisgruntledGoat** · 04-12-2007, 01:49

Well this is bad and very confusioning. It seems only the masks are being affected. I alpha'd out the face and part of the chest and they don't display any of the black edges. I even moved the alpha tigher on the masks. All that did was make the alpha work 100% close up but as you move away the problem gets worse. See the first pic for what I mean.

**DisgruntledGoat** · 04-12-2007, 21:56

I've been playing some more (haven't fixed the problem) but I have decided I utterly HATE the way CA mapped these normans. The belts use the same texture as some models surcoat opening. And then they have the bottom of some armor draw from other areas. So you can't get rid of the belt and the belt has to be the same texture as the part of the model that gets distorted between his legs. So if I wanted to make these guys look historical I wouldn't be able to do anything because the god damn belt is gonna look like the god damn 'skirt' (for lack of a better word). I can't even alpha out the belt unless I want to alpha out the freaking skirt. What a sloppy and all together terrible way to do the textures with this unit. grrr

**Caliban** · 04-13-2007, 01:02

Try colouring the black space around the nose helm gold (same colour as the actual nose part). You will get some feathering when the texture is mip-mapped at a distance which will cause that black area to slightly show. That should fix your black edge problem. If you want to re-map parts of the model, give GOM and KE's new importer/exporter a go.

Caliban