I'll start by saying that I haven't been into painting cars for a long time, so some of this may be done to noobishness, but I had my steps checked by a friend with experience and he told me I made no errors in my procedure. Basically I can't get the alpha layer to work properly on the Callaway Corvette GT3 using GIMP for painting. I didn't change a whole lot about the original template (except for adding my own paint and logos), but I did do this: Disable 'Reflections ' layer group (which I think it's off by default) and consequently layer 51 because it makes the skin almost white. Disable layer 50 in the 'Shad' group for the same reason Deleted some of the textures in 'Parts' to color them I export in the old-fashioned way: open original alt.dds > drag down alpha layer to copy and secure > copy over flattened layer from template to alt.dds > delete original alt.dds layer > add alpha channel mask to the layer > export using BC3/DT5 with mipmaps enabled. The exported skin has lighter colors than it is supposed to, meaning black becomes a mid-to-dark grey (etc). The only way to correct the colors is to disable layer 14 in the 'Shad' group, meaning I no longer have shadow effects. How do I fix this?
In GIMP you need drag and drop all layers with opacity set to 'Multiply'(shadows for example) out of groups to make them work properly.