Armor Textures

[Tarragon Rill]

I am trying to retexture an armor piece, and was looking to edit the original texture. However it seems the textures for the armor parts are all done in a transparency/alpha channel or something. When I open the .dds files they are impossible to look at for a reference to retexture from as it is near impossible to even see anything in them.


EDIT: ok while the BC1/DXT1 setting seems to work fine for character skin. Armor seems to need the BC2/DXT3 format. All this is done from within GIMP using the GIMP DDS plugins.

the armor uses the alpha channel for specular highlights and reflection it seems.