2022-01-12, 00:29
Hurray! Solved!
I made floor.png 100% transparent (lol) and I made bg.jpg 100% black. This completely solved the issue for my use-case. My poor pixels are finally getting a rest!
Interesting note: I haven't noticed any negative effects from doing this so far. All my usual views and visual settings seem to work fine, background brightness adjustment too.
EDIT: making the floor.png fully transparent gets rid of the gradient in the darkening effect. But after more experimenting, changing the hue of floor.png to black (without messing with opacity) actually preserves the original gradient darkening effect of the skin excellently and clears up all of the smudge that originated from this image, so I went with that. In fact, I'm not sure why that image was ever gray/white in the first place (i.e why have a white darkening overlay?).
Admittedly, I still have no idea what the role of bg.jpg is in all of this, but making it 100% black (same as my fallback bg) finally got rid of the last bit of the smudge.
These are the images I ended up compiling into the textures (note the notes on imgur): https://i.imgur.com/a/O38zGY0
I made floor.png 100% transparent (lol) and I made bg.jpg 100% black. This completely solved the issue for my use-case. My poor pixels are finally getting a rest!
Interesting note: I haven't noticed any negative effects from doing this so far. All my usual views and visual settings seem to work fine, background brightness adjustment too.
EDIT: making the floor.png fully transparent gets rid of the gradient in the darkening effect. But after more experimenting, changing the hue of floor.png to black (without messing with opacity) actually preserves the original gradient darkening effect of the skin excellently and clears up all of the smudge that originated from this image, so I went with that. In fact, I'm not sure why that image was ever gray/white in the first place (i.e why have a white darkening overlay?).
Admittedly, I still have no idea what the role of bg.jpg is in all of this, but making it 100% black (same as my fallback bg) finally got rid of the last bit of the smudge.
These are the images I ended up compiling into the textures (note the notes on imgur): https://i.imgur.com/a/O38zGY0