Disappearing Texture Question

[BentonGrey]

Howdy folks!  I am converting some materials from TGA to DDS, and I've taken to the habit of doing actual skins and important bits with GIMP rather than with XnView because the latter tends to degrade quality.  However, I've just encountered several textures that, while showing up fine in game and in XnView, open up in gimp in a gray checkboard pattern and, when exported from there, are invisible and make the things they cover invisible.  Anyone know what's going on and how I can deal with it?

[daglob]

It might be saving it with an alpha channel active when you don't want one. I found several skins that disappeared and a couple that just showed parts of a mesh. This happened after a windows update that disabled my graphics card, and did not offer support in WX (I rolled it back, and check periodically to see if they have new drivers). Send them to me; I have a program that will de-alpha a bogus alpha channel (which may not show up in your graphics program).

I hope it works.

[Deaths Jester]

Yep, the grey checkerboard is a def sign of alpha/layer 0 stuff. This is part of the reason I took the dive and paid the money way back when to get Photoshop 7 ages ago. Still use it to do all my dds conversion even if I do almost all my work in Painter 2015...less likely to give me fits like GIMP and PSP gave me when FFVTRR came about. Course, I also had other reasons to take the dive aside from FF...