Alpha Edges on the Mesa

After finishing the mesa textures yesterday, I was a little disappointed because I could still see what for lack of better word I will call "seams" along the edges of the panels. It wasn't blaringly obvious, but still I knew that it was there, although I had no idea why. I figured it was just one of the limitations of Second Life - or a problem that was beyond my ability to fix. So, I thought that maybe I could try to cover up those seams with some prim tees. That's right, I went shopping!

I needed some trees, and I found some really good ones at a Second Life vendor called Heart Botanicals. Specifically, they had a willow tree, which is one of the natives of El Cerrito. Having learned my shopping lessons from buying the wheat and poppy fields, this time, I made sure that I got full mod and copy permissions on my tree purchases. And they did help hide the seams along the horizontal edges of my mesa flat panels. However, the tops of the mesas still showed edges, and I couldn't put a huge tree at the top of the mesa without ruining the distance perspective. So, I went to Emin to ask him what he thought I could do to get rid of the edges.



He had me off-set the vertical layout of the texture by a tenth of a meter, and that seemed to help. He thought that maybe there was an artifact of some type in the transparency channel ofthe original TARGA files. So I went back into the original texture files and stroked a border of 1 pixel in the alpha channel so that the entire texture was framed with transpparency. I then had to go back into Second LIfe and reapply the textures to the mesa panels, which gets difficult when you have transparent edges stacked onto each other. It took a while, but it cleaned up the seams that I was so worried about. And I learned that any of the flat panel textures that require alpha channels I create in the future, will also be getting transparent frames. You build, you learn!