Need help editting a skin

I am trying to edit the skin of the Blood Elf Lieutenant so that the parts of his armor and helm that are ALWAYS red are instead team colored. I've managed to recolor it to a permanent grayish blue color, but in other attempts to make it team color, those areas become totally invisible on the model in game. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Or if someone has already made a teamcolored edit of this skin, could someone please direct me to it? Thanks in advance.

Your problem is not the skin, is the model itself that defines that geoset's skin as transparent

Here's the deal:

What you see when you look at a model is the texture layered in a material over the mesh.

The mesh is the actual faces, polygons and vertices of the model. It has no texture by itself, but is given lighting by the shader (which isn't important right now). The mesh may be broken up into geosets, which are groups of polygons.

The material is applied to the mesh along with one or more textures to give the mesh detailled colour information. The material can have various blending modes to control the way the texture is displayed. The blending modes interact with the alpha channels on the texture to affect it's transparency.

The texture is the image you draw in photoshop/whatever.

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How Team Colour works:

Most WC3 models are cut up into various geosets to allow for team colour. The areas of the model intended to have team colour will usually have a different material to the areas that aren't. The material that has team colour will have at least two layers; one for the team colour texture itself (called Replaceable ID 1) and one for the texture with all the details you've drawn. The layer with the details will usually be set to Blend, so that the areas that you've alpha'd out in the texture will allow the team colour layer underneath to come through.

So, long story short:

You cannot add team colour to geosets which don't have the material set up for it without editing the model.

Thanks. I can't believe I didn't think of that. I will definitely give that a try! :)