Building, transparency & texture problems

Hi all, had a look through the forum and couldn't find a thread about my issues, of which I am having two:

1. Transparent areas in textures have white edges
So lets say I make a window by creating a black square shaped PNG, highlight a circular area and delete the content of it so that the circle is transparent. I upload the texture and put it on a building block, but the thin border between solid color and transparency shows up as a white outline to the window. Now, even if I go back and use a solid square mask tool to manually remove any area that may be slightly transparent because it’s at the edge of the deletion area and upload the image again I still have the same problem.

2. Building blocks become partially transparent at certain angles.
At the moment (or maybe always) I am having this problem that makes things I build look like M C Escher art. Lets say I build something simple like stairs and rotate my view around them. As I do this, different parts of the staircase will disappear, bits will pop forward and outwards as if they are in an impossible position. Nothing is overlapping. I can even edit a group of objects that was perfect before just by changing the texture and this will give that group of objects the same problem.

If anyone has else has experienced and solved these problems it would be much appreciated if you can help me out with them
Thanks,
Lanny

Lanny, check the stickies in the texturing forum. There's sections rerlating specifically to those two queries.

/109/32/80851/1.html

Thanks for that Carbon... don't know why i couldn't find that thread in searches.

So I can answer my own problems now, just need to try it out.
But for anyone else having the same problems, the solutions are:

1. Use alpha channels
2. Make images that don't have transparency 24bit (no 32bit) and avoid overlaps

Dang now I need to re-upload all my textures!!

Hmmmm.... The answers are a bit more complicated than that. Please read through those stickies very carefully. The first problem you describe is commonly called a "white halo" problem. There are several easy ways to avoid it or to correct for it. I suggest that you use the Search function in the Texture Tips forum to look for the key words "white halo." You'll find that it is discussed frequently. The second issue you mention is called the "alpha sorting" problem or sometimes the "alpha glitch." It is a feature of OpenGL architecture, not SL exclusively. You'll find many archived threads in the Texture Tips forum about it as well. Unlike white halos, alpha sorting is something that you learn to live with and design around. You can't fix it, you can only avoid it.

Before you try to solve your problems by simply uploading your texture again, take time to learn about both of these issues. They aren't as straightforward as you seem to think.

Thanks for the note of caution Rolig... I've made me some bookmarks to read through

Also, upload and test the textures in the test grid... upload is free there. Once you have it right then upload on the live grid.

If you have not been to the test or preview grid open SL and before you login press Cntrl-Shift-G. This will add a drop down next to the login button. This is a toggle so pressing it again makes it go away.

Agni is the name of the live grid.
Aditi is the PREVIEW or test grid.

All the others are for the Lindens and you likely won't be able to go into those.

This grid is usually running Beta software so one can test scripts and other stuff.

More info here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Preview_Grid