Guides Alpha textures: add transparency (or fake rips) to clothes

[atani]

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Alpha textures: add transparency (or fake rips) to clothes - How to fake a rip in clothes and hide parts

Alpha textures
add transparency (or fake rips) to clothes


Alpha textures are greyscale images that say how transparent things are:

• White (#FFFFFF or 255,255,255) is 0% transparent;
• Black (#000000 or 0,0,0) is 100% transparent;
• Values in between have equivalent transparency.

Transparency in clothing can be used for all kinds of reasons. For example, you can take a t-shirt and add...

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[Sally Whitemane]

Adding notes to save VAM alpha textures optimized. Add to the guide if you like.

• VAM alpha textures are by definition black and white images. So saving in RGB mode is suboptimal. Save as grey instead to cut the uncompressed image data to a third. Stores 1 channel instead of 3 for RGB colors, smaller file size.
• Never save VAM alpha textures with alpha aka transparency channel. It use useless. No alpha channel, smaller file size.
• VAM can load VERY small 1 bit images. Keep in mind with only 2 colors there is no more translucent transition (grey) between opaque and transparent. That makes 4 bit a very good balanced choice for when you need soft transitions with a small file size.
• These are file- and download- size optimizations. They will not reduce RAM / VRAM usage. While VAM loads textures the pixel format is converted for the GPU with 8 bits per red/green/blue - effectively making it large in memory.
• While possible, using JPEG is bad for alpha precision/quality with it's lossy compression. Use PNG.

Example for the 2048 x 2048 image 'Lola - shorts - Alpha.png' from 'Atani.Alphas.8.var':

• 190.224 bytes 8bit RGB 256 indexed colors
• 85.166 bytes 8 bit GREY (100% lossless)
• 13.336 bytes 1 bit GREY 2 indexed colors (lossy for transitions)

Spoiler: Converted in GIMP 2.99.14 like this:

Image > Mode > Indexed... > [x] Use black and white (1-bit) palette
File > Export As... > file.png > export > 8 pbc GRAY > export

With right settings other tools should give similar results. Irfan View converts to greyscale with Ctrl & G and seems to save slightly smaller files than GIMP. Smallest I got was 9.423 Bytes with special PNG tools.

 

[atani]

Thank you, I will add it to the guide.

 

[atani]

atani updated Alpha textures: add transparency (or fake rips) to clothes with a new update entry:

Added texture optimisation section

Section content courtesy of @Sally Whitemane

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