Background color of diffuse textures

zzz7net

What is the best background color for a diffuse texture ?
Most of them have a black background color, but why not white or something else ?

Skin and hairs looks like the best on white. Blue is the best for Photoshop masking because this color is the most rare in character texture but it looks funky.

What do you think ?

m4dcow

The only place it actually matters is for sections of a texture that use alpha maps, such as foliage, hair, fur etc... The best background for these is the color of whatever is being masked, so green blades of grass would look best on a green background, red hair on a red background etc... This avoids those blacks or white halos around the edges of the mask that show up due to mip mapping.

If you are working with lower res textures, where you may not have all that much padding between UV shells, you want to pack things of a similar color together and have the backround be that color too so when the textures MIP lower, you don't see other colors bleeding in.

The only other situation I can think of is for fx textures, where alot of the time instead of having an actual alpha map, they use additive blends where the background needs to be black so you don't see the edges.

zzz7net

Wow .. useful detailed reply. Thanks!

cupsster

use "Solidify" A B or C variant from FlamingPearl in PS on collapsed layer with transparent pixels. mipmaps will blend much better!!!