You are right lol i just looked through a tutorial about dds retexturing and white is definately the parts that show, so if they are white on Postal that can't be why they arnt showing up. But like you said the object wasn't showing up normal when you viewed it. Argh! I wish someone else would input into my problem too lol

I've been having more thoughts. I don't think this is an alpha problem. Workshop usually manages to show transparent bits as transparent not black. I think that's its way of saying "I can't find a valid DDS to render this in". I wonder if you have a corrupt image file there, or one missing that it needs.

I am afraid I am going to have to suggest you clone the dishwasher again, do it all in one pass (ie renumbering at the same time as cloning) then test in the game at every step of your work.

Did you make a new mesh or just retexture the dishwasher as it was? If you made a new mesh, try replacing the mesh and test in game before attempting to edit the DDSs

If you didn't do that already, try to check the order of the groups in Milkshape, I know some people had that problem earlier that the game rendered the dropshadow group as the object, which resulted in the object being invisible... or something like that ^^

Hmm.. again, something to get my hopes up about but i bet it won't be it. Well i edited parts of the dishwasher mesh, deleted the front of it and remade it to be precise, and saved it as a .ms3d. Then i imported each of the other 3 mesh files into it and resized my edited milkshape copy to the same size, deleted the originals and exported. Then exported all the dds img files and edited the part mask one, the grey scale one, the lighter whitish one and the dull grey one. Basically all the ones with the uv map image parts on. Didnt do anything with all the other texture files or the red square ones etc. But like i said, in the game catalog the object is showing up the right shape and with the texture in the right place. Perplexing!

On the note of order groups.. when i imported the original mesh before editing, the main object group was group00 and the dropshadow was group01 so i made sure they were the same when i had finished and exported. The dropshadow is actually showing in game though! but the object itself isn't.

I will reclone and make the package and do as you suggested, testing it before touching the dds's

EDIT: right okay it's definately my mesh that i've done something wrong with. I just redid all the meshes as i assumed is the right way, didnt touch any of the dds's and although i can again see the item in the catalog (be it with screwed up original textures) it's invisible in game. Maybe i am doing something wrong during the process. But i can reload the meshes back into milkshape after exporting and they show up fine etc. I got 2 windows during the process that i wanted to check wernt problems.. One when exporting the first edited mesh "12 vertices split", and one when uvmapping about coordinates out of bounds do i want to correct this, and i said yes. The dishwashers original texture size was a square. But when i remapped the object (using uvmapper and making a box uv map) i was making the textures 1024 x 512

So you fixed the out of bounds coordinates? If you export to .obj to import to UVMapper don't you lose your joint assignments?

If you export to .obj, do you use import .obj, or import .obj uv only? I had read that yes, but in the joints tab its still selecting the object when i click selassigned.. at least i'm pretty sure it was. After importing the uv map back in and exporting using Wes' plugins i wasn't getting any lost bones error.

Well something is very confusing about this whole project indeed. Everyone says, and it has been my personal experience, that once you've had your mesh exported to .obj you've lost your joint assignments. Either you have just the right nack for avoiding this event (in which case I want to know how), or you're not doing something you think you're doing.

I'm guessing i'm not doing something that i should, cos i'm certainly not very pro at meshes. If i'm importing the .obj file do you just select the vertices you want and reassign then to the joint?

Well yes, if it's still there at all. If you didn't have to do that, then I am stumped how.

I think the issue with groups is people do not realize that in TS3 the game cares only about the order the groups are in, not the names. The groups, when imported, are named simply by putting numbers are "group". In the MLOD file, they have no name.

When exported, they are exported based on the order they have on the list. If the list says group01 and group00, then what was the second group is now first... and that is one reason dropshadows get mixed up with object meshes.

The other thing that bites some people is that when they are importing with .obj format, MilkShape will retain the original group name, either by adding what you are importing to a group with the same name, or creating a new group with that name.

While guarding against being bitten by the .obj file naming design can be difficult, reversing the dropshadow groups should not be hard to check, or correct. The Up/Down buttons on the groups panel makes reordering the groups very easy.

<* Wes *>

I just tested your object in my game and I think the issue is not with invisible textures but something else. It doesn't even want to appear, I can see the cursor is a grabbing hand shape but there is no green outline of the footprint and the game gets so slow it almost freezes, until I switch to another object. I have no idea how to fix it though, sorry