Why is it Impossible to Use a Texture with Transparency. Maddening!

Questions & Answers
1

I am astonished how difficult it is to do such a trivial task in other authoring tools: use a texture with transparency. Absolutely maddening!!

Attempt 1
In Photoshop a texture with dots surrounded by transparency. Note the (should be unnecessary) alpha channel added as a vain attempt to appease the Unity gods:

89843-hell-1-photoshop-in-photoshop.jpg
89843-hell-1-photoshop-in-photoshop.jpg1836×1476 371 KB

In Unity

89844-hell-1-photoshop-alpha-channel-unity.jpg
89844-hell-1-photoshop-alpha-channel-unity.jpg744×1620 139 KB

WHITE DOTS!?! Useless. Fail

Attempt 2
Convert to PNG and import to Unity. This forum does not allow more pictures - WTF? - so I cannot show you the results. I get a nice texture with dots and transparency but the material ignores the transparency and I get dots on white. No way to force the issues. FAIL.

Can someone PLEASE provide a bulletproof solution. Super frustrated.

2

When you imported as PNG what compression settings were you using? If it was DXT1, your sheet would have full colour images with white fill surrounding them (like you described). Try a different compression setting that supports alpha (DXT5), or manually override it to choose one. Same story if it was ETC1. Use the extra alpha channel option or ETC2.