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I spent all day playing around with GIMP trying to learn about decals and posters/signs and trying to make some parts of an entity transparent. Arg. So many times I read that true black is transparent in FPSC. But no matter what I did, my objects still had the black backgrounds. I was convinced that FPSC could "see" true black. I made a true black texture, saved it as a tga and my object was all black in the game.

I was totally confused until I read IndyDude's tutorial. I made a true black texture, saved it as a JPG and now my object is transparent! However, trying to create a decal with decal.jpg didn't work. But I did find a way to get my decals to work (and another way to get transparency for blood stains without using a jpg that contains black!

For GIMP, start a new document with a transparent background. (File.New.Advanced Options. Fill with. Transparency) Use a red paint brush. Make some squiggly lines. Save it as a .tga. If you texture a box with this, the box will be invisible . All you will see is the red lines floating in space. If you save it as a decal.tga and follow the tutorial for importing decals into FPSC you'll also have the transparency in your 16 frame animation.

It seems simple now but all the talk of adding a Mask layer, adding an Alpha Channel, and using true black had me spinning in circles.

Sorry to post on both of your threads about this, but I am still having trouble getting a transparent decal. Mine is a bloody footprint and I have tried with transparent background and pure black. It's even worse now, I used to get the image just no transparency, but now nothing is even showing up. I downloaded a dds on the forum and went through all the steps to create the decal, and it worked. So I know (mostly) for sure it has to do with my DDS. I noticed when I right click on the file in Vista it has a description. Well mine says "dds, 256x256 pixel, 32 bpp, 9 frames" All the other descriptions I read for already made decals have all that, but the -"9 frames" part.

Could this be the problem? I am at a loss and have been trying to figure this out for 2 days. I have to finally ask because I am losing my mind.