Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/10/03/alpha-problem-with-transparent-gif-texture-and-answer-from-blender-artists-forums/

I’ve had another idea for an animation – yes I know I’m not finished with my first cute cat animation, but this idea is a really good one and can’t wait. It’ll be a kind of 2D version of a 3D animation.

My idea is that instead of creating characters and scenery from 3D primitives and other meshes in Blender, I’ll just draw them freehand with a pencil and scan them in as gifs instead, or maybe pings I haven’t decided yet.

You see, no matter what I try some of the feedback I’ve been getting about my 3D works is that it looks too glossy and smooth, too much like Pokemon.

So in response to this feedback I have been trying to directly turn my 2D sketches into a 3D animation, but came across some problems. I want to simply sketch my characters and then model them in 2.5D in Blender. I thought that would be easy if I just added a transparent gif with nontransparent outlines of my character created in Photoshop or Gimp, and then filled in the outlines with 3D shapes.

But when I added a gif it had a grey border (where the original plane holding the gif peeked out, not the transparent border I expected, what on earth was I to do. I started Googling to see if anyone else had had this problem, and lo and behold, [beginner] Alpha texture problem (colored edge around a transparant gif texture) – Blender Artists Forums, everything spelled out in small words, just the way I like it.