Black edges on rug w/ alpha

I believe that alpha blended 1 means that the texture has a translucent (grayscale) alpha, rather than just transparent/opaque. Alpha mask threshold means that any color in the alpha equal to or over the chosen value (0-255) will be opaque, and under will be transparent. In my experience setting the threshold higher can sometimes make the edges look smoother.

In this case I think the black edges are caused by the edges of your alpha lining up exactly with those of your texture. With this type of object it is helpful to work in .dds, because it allows you to make the alpha a few pixels smaller than the main texture, helping to eliminate this problem. The rugs look nice though. 

TL;DR. AlphaBlended makes it so that your object will use an alpha channel. AlphaMaskThreshold tells the game how to interpret the colors in your alpha. Read on for a more in-depth and maybe-not-correct explanation.

Enabling AlphaBlended just makes it so that your mesh can utilize an alpha channel for transparency. Take a look at this tutorial.

0 = false and 1 = true. So if AlphaBlended was set to 0 it would be disabled; 1 would mean it's enabled.

If you use Ctrl + Shift + C you can bring up a window in Studio and you can enter a cheat code (type "help" for a list of codes). Alphalpha adds and enables AlphaBlended. It's just a quick way of doing what the tutorial describes. It's a shortcut.

The general rule for the alpha channel of a texture is that anything in the alpha channel that's pure white will NOT be transparent--will be fully rendered in-game--while anything pure black will be completely invisible in-game. The alpha channel only works in greyscale, meaning it will only use black or white or levels of grey, no colors. So, if you wanted your item to have no transparency you'd make your alpha white--not the whole area, just where your UV islands are. Here's an example of what I mean. Ignore what's written there. I was having issues with the alpha channel not saving correctly.



If you wanted your item to be completely invisible you'd paint the whole alpha channel black. If you wanted some transparency you'd use grey. Darker grey means more transparency; lighter grey means less transparency.

AlphaMaskThreshold. That one I'm not entirely sure of. I think that it sort of evens out the black or white or grey in the alpha. For instance, you might have areas at the edges of your alpha channel that are blurred a bit. Like if you have a curved edge in an image sometimes you'll get feathering instead of a crisp edge. The feathered areas won't be the same color as the rest so AlphaMaskThreshold somehow fixes that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is what I mean by a feathered edge.



In graphics world, colors represent numbers. It's always about numbers and math, math and numbers. I'm not sure what the number range is. I think white represents 0 while black represents the highest number which I believe is 128 (not sure, trying to google, finding very little info). So, say for instance your alpha channel was 50% grey, but at the edges, because of feathering, the color is, say 60% grey (a darker grey). You don't want the feathering because it messes with how the transparency looks at the edges of your item. I think you can tell the game that any color darker than 50% grey should be treated as if it were pure black. This forces the game to treat the edges as if they were crisp with no feathering. AlphaMaskThreshold is what you use to give the game instructions on how to treat feathered edges.

This is as near as I understand it and I hope it makes some sense. Hopefully, I didn't get any of it wrong. I struggle with it, too.

this image is really helpful - thanks! also you can actually preview the alphamaskthreshold values and what it will look like in blender if anyone needs help setting that up, ping me!