So I'm in the process of making a new set of cat people skins and ideally I'd like to have the markings as an overlay so I can eliminate seam issues for male/female meshes and have the markings progress with age. This looked fine the last time I made cat skins, but on the new set the marking overlays have some serious banding/pixellation issues in-game. Left image is with the markings as part of the skin texture, right image is the markings as an overlay. Lots of artifacts around the spots, and some discoloration in a few areas.


I'm working with TS4 Skininator and everything looks fine in preview, and I've never had this issue making tattoos or skin details, so I'm pretty confident it's not the texture itself. No changes made to the marking layer between the two, and I've tried saving/importing the overlay as both png and dds. Only difference from the last skins is that the new ones are higher resolution and more detailed, so it's possible I just wasn't seeing the issue last time, but the change is pretty significant. Any insight/potential solutions would be greatly appreciated (even is the solution is "you're bang out of luck my dude, the game just does that" it would be good to know so I don't waste more time trying to solve this).