How do you make material see-thru?

I know how to do your alpha channels so no white is showing. And I thought for making like see thru items that turning down the blending would make it partially see thru. Mine looks more like pasty white paint after i do that..like it does when you first make a new shirt in sl... any advice..i'd like to start trying other things that require see through fabrics..

Hi Syn,

Read the sticky at the top of this forum, that's what it's there for! For see through you're looking at shades of grey rather than black and white in the alpha channel - the amount of transparency is proportional to the blackness of that point of the channel.

Setting transparency on the layer will work if you have a fixed multi-layer item of clothing so that the outer layer is see through and there's something solid under it - what you're seeing trying it this way is a sort of blank underlayer giving you the pasty white, I suspect because SL says "It's not transparent so it must be over white" although I'm not 100% sure about that.

I did read it..twice Maybe im missing it..I see where they say add gray or shades of gray to get rid of the white halo effect..but im not seeing anything about making your texture transparent..

ok wait ..where your item is white in the alpha you pant it grey im thinking..and what if it is more intricate..how do you see which parts to color without looking at the material..since you can only use one alpha correct? heh im probably making this way more complicated then it is

Hi there Syn

The grey in the alpha channel is what will give you the transparent look. So instead of having only white (for the visible part of the item) and black (for the completely see-thru part of the item) you will add grey to the channel for semi-transparancy. A dark grey making it almot completely transparent and a light grey almost completely opaque. (And greys in between for transparency in between )

I mostly use paths for this. But you can use the selection tool you feel most comfortable with.

For Photoshop - I use CS

With paths: While on your layers and therefore able to see your material, use the pen tool to create a path around the section you want to "grey." Now change the path to a selection. This you can do in the paths window, click on the 3rd little icon from the left, at the bottom of the window, while your work path is active. You could also left-click on the work path and choose "make selection" It is usually a good idea to save your path first though.

Now go to your channels window and make your alpha channel the active one, and fill the selection with the grey of your choice.

Save your image as 32-bit targa and upload. You will be able to see if it worked in the preview window.

Hope that helps.

Syn, let's slow down and back up a bit. I'm sure I can help you get your head around this. Forget about the white halo stuff for a minute, and let's just talk about your first question, semi-transparency.

I'm acutally really glad you posted this, by the way, because the sticky isn't perfect yet. I wrote almost all of it in one sitting, and I'm sure that as time passes more FAQ's will appear that need to be added. Yours would certainly qualify. The information is all in there already, of course, but apparently not in a way that's readily obvious to every reader since as you say you read it twice and still missed it. I'll keep tweaking the info as more and more questions like this come up. Thanks for having the courage to be first.

Okay, so how do you make a portion of an image semi-transparent? The answer is to color the corresponding part of the alpha channel gray. The darker the gray, the more transparent. The lighter the gray, the more opaque. The atached image shows what the gray values look like for various levels of transparency.

None of the grays on the alpha channel should be confused with the method I described of using a dark layer to eliminate haloing. They are two completely seperate things. Eliminating the halos, as described in the sticky, is a function performed with layers, not with channels. In a channel, shades of gray are used to represent mathmatical values for color, transparency, and other attributes. In a layer, gray is gray for real.

As for the question of how to know what part of the image should be what shade of gray in the alpha channel, ask a hundred experts and you'll get a hundred different methods. I'll mention a couple of them, but in the end it's not really a question of technique or how-to. It comes down to developing an intuitive understanding of how all this works, which I promise you will come with time as you do this stuff more and more.

One method is to use selections as anyanka mentioned. Select a portion of the image either with the vector tools or the marquee tools, and then when you flip to the channels palette, the marching ants around the selection will remain visible. This is pretty much the method explained in the first Photoshop tutorial in the sticky.

Another way to go about is to use mask so you can see exactly what your transparency looks like as you work. This is the method outlined in the third tutorial. Put all your layers in a group, apply a mask to the group, and then paint the transparency onto the mask.

There are literally thousands of other ways to go about it. Eventually you'll settle on one or more ways that you like best. The important thing is that you grasp the basic concept of how channels work. After that, it mostly comes down to practice makes perfect.

EDIT: I've added a new item to the FAQ's, entitled "How do I make part of an image translucent, as opposed to fully transparent?"

Anyanka, and Chosen thank you! I didn't think I was crazy Ok I have i think the basic concept for doing this thanks to both of your explainations. That color chart for grays is great Chosen, now I have an idea of how light or rather transparent I want to go and which color greys I want to pick.

Chosen your Tut's and Robins are great by the way. Its because of you two i've gotten as far as I have..4 weeks ago I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to even use photoshop..a month later im making pretty decent clothing ..Thank you both