Color information base skins ?

[Gaudin de Beaufort]

For the first time I created my own skin and put the base color of the car in the DDS file.
(I had no PSD file of the car)
But I also see skins where only the stickers, numbers etc are in the DDS file but the rest is transparent.
In which file is the information about the basic color of the body?
Thanks in advance for your responses !

 

[Hoksu]

it's the txDetail file, usually it's called metal_detail.dds but it depends on the car, and many cars have different txDetail for different parts of the skin (e.g. another for metal and another for carbon fiber). In this case the txDiffuse also needs an alpha channel to determine what is txDetail and what is txDiffuse. Black = txDetail (the basic body color), white = txDiffuse (decals, numbers etc). Also since it needs alpha information to work, the .dds must be exported in a format that maintains alpha information, such as DXT5. DXT1 has no alpha so it only works with textures that don't need alpha.

I was pretty confused about them too when I first started making skins, but figured it out eventually. You will too

 

[Gaudin de Beaufort]

Many thanks for your clear explanation !