I was in search for a solution to remove the halo effect around alpha channeled images. I think the halo problem is even mentioned in one of the stickies at this board. What i found was more than unsatisfying. Just one little photoshop plugin. Which even refused to run in Gimp or any other third party graphics software. And i dont have Photoshop. The result of this plugin was crap anyways from what i was told. Maybe some of you know it. It
s called Solidify.
Well, i started Plan B then. And started to develop my own little freeware tool for just the sake of removing the halo effect around alphachanneled graphics, called Halo Remover. Additionally you can fill up the gaps between the UV patches at a texture with the right colours.
The project page for this tool can be found here. Thats where you can find the new versions in case there are some changings. Which is very likely. It
s still beta
http://reinerstileset.4players.de/haloremoverE.html
What is the halo effect? It`s the halo that appears around the visible part of alpha channeled images. It is caused by Antialias for example. Then the visible background colour bleeds into the visible part. Or by mip mapping, when a game texture gets scaled smaller.
A classical example is a alpha channeled grass or twig texture. The Unity inbuilt terrain grass and trees doesn`t use alpha channels from what i know. Well, when importing yes, but Textures gets converted to an image with one transparent colour. And so the effect is not this obvious here. In fact when testing my grass texture in Unity the not prepared grass looked even better, heh
Nevertheless, i will use this grass here to explain the halo effect. This here is my unprepared alpha channeled texture:
And this is the prepared alpha channeled texture:
They both look really similar, don`t they? But the rendered result is very different:
A big difference