Texture Expansion

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‌Texture Expansion ‌

When the texture is later applied to the mesh, it may show small seams with intermediate alpha values at the boundaries between different parts of the texture image. Some software (eg Blender) may unwrap meshes to many different pieces within the texture image, producing many seams. While blending pixels may be helpful for compositing meshes with open edges (for example a piece of terrain), they cause artifacts when they occur in larger closed models, for example a head.

You can eliminate these seams using the Script/Mesh/Texture Expander tool. It will bump the edges of the texture outward a few pixels and clamp all pixels with non- zero alpha to alpha=1, eliminating this source of seams. (There may still be visible boundaries between triangles due to the triangularization, especially when triangles are too big or are seen nearly at edge-on.)

You must run the Texture Expander tool manually after a texture extraction, specifying the number of pixels (typically 1 or 2). The tool updates the texture files of all selected meshes when you run it; you can have it either change the texture file in place, or have it write a separate copy of the texture with an added suffix to the filename (_out by default).

NOTE: This functionality is likely to be directly integrated into the Texture panel in a future release.

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