It Used To Work!

Hey folks..
Contrary to what a lot of people will prolly say, it used to be possible to make transparancy with clothes/textures etc without using an alpha channel.


I used to use chip midnights templates to make Tshirts, and I didnt have a single alpha channel in the damn thing, and when I saved as a 32 bit targa file, and uploaded to SL - blam: perfect tshirt, with transparancy where I wanted, no messing with alpha channels.

I could also put stuff semi opaque on layers, and then they would appear that way in SL.

Basically pure wysiwyg editing for those of you who know what that means.

There were no alpha channels in the template, before you say. I know this because a couple of times I left one of the guide layers on, and I got guide marks over the "arms" bit where there should have been transparancy, turning them off in PS and reuploading a new tga file fixed the problem. Plus I looked! - no alpha channels were there!

This was great, I was happy and all was well with the world. Then one day, it didnt work. I talked to livehelp, then a linden, who eventually said yes there was a problem, and they were looking into it. Nothing since. I dont think it works again now either.

Someone, somewhere must have had this, the same as me. And this being the case, why are we all messing about with alpha channels when actually if they just change a few files back to however they were, we wouldnt have to.

and NO I'm not crazy! (just mildly annoyed )


SOMEONE HELP AND TELL ME HOW TO MAKE IT LIKE IT WAS!!

All this alpha channel stuff is extra hassle that is unnessessary!

Any chance you had PS7 and then upgraded? I believe it was 7 that auto-created the alpha channel for you. Also the adobe website has a plugin you can use I believe to emulate this. Here
And my over use of the word believe is because I'm not a PS user, I just read the forums too much and remember this being discussed.

Hope it does what you want,
Sun

The only possible way you wouldn't have been manually creating alpha channels in the past would be if you had been using Photopshop 7.0 or if another version of PS had been butchered to insert the PS7.0 TGA save processor. 7.0 was Adobe's one and only experiement with automating the alpha channel creation for TGA. The experiment was a failure. Adobe quickly acknowledged it was a mistake, that they should never have messed with it, and they released the free 7.0.1 upgrade to return the TGA save process to the way it had always been before, and it's been that way ever since.

While at first glance, the 7.0 method appears to be a time saver, it is actually anything but. It causes artifacts, the most common of which is the white halo that plagues so many images in SL. Without the control that manual alpha creation allows, there is no way whatsoever to get rid of the artifacts. Maunual alpha channel creation and manipulation is not a "hassle", and it's not "unnecessary". It is a simple process that once you learn, you have kind of an "oh, duh" moment, and then you never look back. Even the most complex alpha in the world only takes a minute to make. The kind typically used for clothing and such in SL only take a few seconds once you know how.

If you really want to go back to the 7.0 process, you can, but understand you would be doing so at your own peril. I can promise you that your images will never EVER look as good as they should until and unless you learn how to do alphas yourself. It's extrmely simple, so there's really no reason not to.

Also realize that without manual control over the alpha, there are certain images can take hours that would otherwise take seconds. For example, if you want an image that grades evenly from fully transparent at one end to fully opaque at the other, like the beam of a spotlight for instance, how would you do it? With manual control on the alpha channel, all you need to do is a black to white gradient and you're done, literally a 1/10 of a second job. Without manual control, you'd need to spend several hours with the eraser on a low setting, gradually building transparency, little by little by little, to make sure the transition from opaque to transparent is smooth, and if you make a mistake you're totally screwed.

The concept of channels for graphics manipulation is almost as old as personal computing itself. It's been around forever. Nothing lasts that long with computers unless it works, really works. Alphas have all kinds of uses besides just transparency. Learning to use them is simple, and it's an important skill. I can guarantee you that once you've made the decision to learn it, and you get used to the process, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

hey folks

First off thanks to those that responded, and so quickly too! I really appreciate it

Howeverrrr

I was using Adobe Photoshop CS2 all the way through.

In fact, *absolutely nothing* changed client side at all (eg my side)

Basically I was working on some shirts, and uploading them,

went to bed, even left the pc and photoshop running, basicalyl just quit SL and went to bed,
next day 9am - suddenly it didnt work.

So the mystery continues.

L$1000's worth of free furnature and clothes to whoever can fix it! Its interesting now eh!?

Hmm, that is a mystery then. You say you were just doing a T-shirt. Is it possible the sliders on the shirt happened to be set perectly to match the borders of your texture?

You said some things were "semi opaque on layers." Were those layers sitting on top of other layers that were opaque, or did they go all the way through so you could see avatar skin underneath? The reason I ask is that layer to layer transparency is not affected by the alpha channel at all. It's not real transparency. When you put a semi-transparent layer on top of another layer in PS, all that happens is the pixels of the 2 layers get combined. The sum of the two layers still equals 100% opacity. Only the alpha channel can dictate the master opacity for the image as a whole.

If you indeed were seeing variable levels of transparency on areas of the image that had nothing to do with sliders, and your image really did not possess an alpha channel, then I'm going to chalk it up to glitch in your graphics card. It's not supposed to work that way. Sometimes when textures don't fully load, they appear to be see-through. That's my best guess.

" Hmm, that is a mystery then. You say you were just doing a T-shirt. Is it possible the sliders on the shirt happened to be set perectly to match the borders of your texture? "

===Nope

You said some things were "semi opaque on layers." Were those layers sitting on top of other layers that were opaque, or did they go all the way through so you could see avatar skin underneath? The reason I ask is that layer to layer transparency is not affected by the alpha channel at all. It's not real transparency. When you put a semi-transparent layer on top of another layer in PS, all that happens is the pixels of the 2 layers get combined. The sum of the two layers still equals 100% opacity. Only the alpha channel can dictate the master opacity for the image as a whole

== Basically, I had some areas totally clear, so the skin showed up below, and some semitransparant, like highlights I'd made using a bit of white set to be semitransparant. So the short answer, is both.

If you indeed were seeing variable levels of transparency on areas of the image that had nothing to do with sliders, and your image really did not possess an alpha channel, then I'm going to chalk it up to glitch in your graphics card. It's not supposed to work that way. Sometimes when textures don't fully load, they appear to be see-through. That's my best guess.

=== I would be happy with that, but a Linden confirmed to me that "we're aware of the problem, and we're working on it" - So clearly something happened. I learned how to do the way I did it from a tutorial, I'll see if I can find it again to post a link to it here. But it didnt involve alpha channels lol. Besides it'd have to be some sort of divine intervention glitch to create a perfect alpha channel - me and everyone else can see the Tshirts perfectly, even tho they were made with no use of an alpha channel...

Perhaps I should raise the prize to L$2000... But seriously folks how WEIRD is this whole thing, that it worked with no alpha channel, and that no one else has ever made transparant stuff with no alpha channel.. I was expecting a few "Me too, why doesnt it work?" posts from other people with the same problem... STRANGE..

Consider the prize doubled LOL

Best wishes!

I'd love to see one of these shirts, and to be able to save it to disk and take a good look at it. Because, you see, what you describe is simply impossible.

Without an alpha channel, Second Life has no idea what pixels to make transparent, and which to make opaque. It's how the renderer works.

So I'd love to know what was actually happening.

Have you saved one of these textures back to disk, and looked for an alpha channel after that?