Hey Everyone...

Alright, so I'm having some trouble with a female twi'lek Im trying to re-skin. I haven't seen any posts by anyone else having this problem... which leads me to believe I'm either doing this terribly wrong or there's a very simple solution.

So... the .pngs in the "models\players\jedi_tf" folder are .pngs and not .jpgs because they have transparent spaces on them. But when I modify these .pngs in photoshop, and re-save them as .pngs, then try to view the modifications in modview, I get white spaces around the edges of the area that I modified. I've spoken to a few other skinners about this and they've told me the problem is with "semi-transparent pixels", but they're running into the same problem and it has them stumped. Any help would be awesome, thanks!

~Aeris

Actually it has been asked, but nevertheless... the problem is the PNG plugin for that crappy :D Photoshop ;) (just joking).

I use Macromedia Fireworks for it (almost for everything, since I started working with it in version 2) and since the standard for Fireworks is... .PNG you will find out that it will handle png's/transparancy wonderfully! :)

So what you could do is make the skin in Photoshop and "cut" the transparant parts out in Fireworks and voila :).

Hmmm... Any way to change the cursors in Fireworks to simple ones? I find the "lasso" etc. difficult to use and I'd like a precise crosshair if possible :)

Hmmm not that I am aware off, but then again.. I never needed it to be altered... (justgave it a look and could not find the option).... if I have to use the lasso, I focus at the bottom part of it.....

Ok - I guess I'll have to manage.

Making the pixels transparent in Fireworks doesn't seem to work for me though. I wonder why Raven didn't make a seperate tutorial for the customizable skins because frankly I'm tired of this trial and, more notably overweight, of error method :(

Well, I will give it a try tomorrow (NL time) and as soon as I found out more... you'll read it here... :)

We've found the plugin that lets you correctly creat alpha channels for .png's. You can find the plugin here (http://www.angelfire.com/crazy2/xclone_0101/Jk_JA_skinning.html).

yeah geez, where have you people been....this has been an ongoing discussion for weeks now.....

neither photoshop or fireworks come with plugins that handle the alpha channel in .png correctly.....it is a channel, not a layer.....listed in the channels section on your layers window.....
it allows for semi-transparent images, so that textures can remain when color changes are applied, or at least that's the theory behind raven using it.....

for more follow the below links

http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=113002)

http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=116358)

download the plugin and don't make things TRANSPARENT in your image....this is not a traditional transparency as in web gifs.....add a new CHANNEL in your channels menu(or go to channels if you are editing an existing .png), call it alpha 1 (or 2 if it's a second one :)).....the channel functions pretty much the same as quick mask, when viewing your new channel by itself it will be solid black, paint white any area you do not want transparent.....when viewing the alpha channel with the other layers visible the work is a little different.....paint what you want transparent, and use the eraser to to remove the areas you do not want transparent.....they should not appear as traditional transparencies in photoshop, but more like quick masked areas.....hope this helps