Why are skins always invisible, ARGHHHH?!

Hihi. I have only just started editing skins, and the first thing I have ever done to do with skins is a simple alteration of the captain skin, a bit of recolouring, removing a few things and so on. However, I have saved it as BMP, then converted to BLP using WC3 Viewer, then changed the captain's main skin in viewer to my custom one, but it is just invisible on the parts I have edited, but still shows blobs of red where the player colour goes on the shoulder pads and shield. Before it converted to BLP, it told me that there were no alpha channels, and that it would have to add an opaque alpha channel before it could be converted (maybe that is the prob) I also edited the rifleman skin a bit and this time imported to WE. I did everything properly I think. Changed the path to units/human/rifleman/rifleman.blp (or something like that, I pasted from viewer so I know it is right) Then restarted WE etc, etc, but still invis, in-game aswell as in editor.

PLEASE HELP ME LOL I AM NOOB TO SKINNING

Your problem is that you need to convert to .tga, not to .blp. If you convert an exported .blp file into a .tga file it automatically saves the alpha channels with it, if you do it as .bmp it doesnt. I doubt you could even add an alpha to a .bmp file.

so... use .tga, that should work perfectly.

OK I tried TGA. I opened up viewer, extracted the captain's skin as TGA, edited it a little, exported as TGA again, then when I try to open it up in viewer, it says it can't open it because it is not a TGA?! WTF ROFL

EDIT: Dude nvm, I tried the same thing but imported back to viewer as a JPG and it seems to have worked. It told me I need to let it create an opaque alpha channel again, but I clicked OK and changed the captains skin to my custom one again and it appears to have worked fine. Thnx for the help anyways :D

Skins in wc3 are standard BLP.
Extract a skin with the vieuwer, and convert it to TGA.
Edit the file.
Save it as a TGA.
Conver the TGA to BLP
Import in wc3vieuwer.

What i always do to get my skins into vieuwer, is put the new blp file in a map in the wcIII directory, follwing the import path the skin should have.

For example, if i want the warden skin, I would create a map in my wc3 directory called "textures", and put the IronRaven.blp (or Iron_Raven?) into that map. wc3v will now show the new warden skin by default when you vieuw the warden model.

Some programs randomly delete the alpha channel in my experience, so you may have to re-add it.

I have this problem too when i save in bmp 32 bits , but when i save in 24 bits i dont have this problem

PS CS2 removes the alpha layer when saving I believe, happened to me iirc