Hi, your problems seemed simple enough so I decided to fix the project files for you. First thing I should mention is that the head was set to smooth shading for some reason. It’s a blocky character, so it would make more sense to leave that set to flat shading.
The next issue is the scaling. Cycles treats every 1 blend unit as a meter, and this can affect the result of some of the shaders. I scaled it down a lot.
The third problem (as well as the main problem) is the fact that you are scaling up a really small texture using linear interpolation. That is the reason the character appears blurry. It’s the same thing that happens when you scale up a really small image in an image editor. Graphics programs try to smooth out the blocky edges in order to make lines appear straight, so you need to set the scaling algorithm to closets (aka no interpolation, or neareast neighbor) in order to keep the pixels sharp:
Here’s the corrected blend file for that scene:View1_Test1-fixed.blend (613.1 KB)
You’ll notice that I used the node editor to set the material up. Basically, this setup makes cycles use a transparency shader for all the parts of the model that have to be transparent. Here’s video about cycles materials that should help explain how it works:
I also made an in depth explaination with examples concerning mixing textures in cycles. Its not the same thing, but the concepts are similar to mixing shaders, so you might find it useful. Just make sure that you don’t try to plug a green output into a yellow input:
And finally, here’s how I went about making a glowing gauntlet"
blend file for the scene:View2_Test1-fixed.blend (655.8 KB)
It looks complex, but all I did was make a black and white mask for the glowing parts of the gauntlet and used that to mix the normal material with a glowing one. I also placed a single area light into the scene to cast a sharp shadow, but you could also try deleting that and just increasing the strength of the emission shader that’s in the material.