help with understanding texture alphas

[Anonymous]

From what I understand, you can use the alpha of a texture for things like transparency, but I can't figure out how to use them. For some reason I'm unable to connect Out Alpha to the transparency node in hypershade (nor Alpha is Luminance, Alpha Gain, Or Alpha offset). In fact the normal map outputs the out alpha rather than color, which is what I thought would have been used. I had read the issue may have something to do with dds files (I imported a model from a game to use as a reference for my own model, I don't know much about the dds file format) and the solution was to convert them to targas, but I still have the same issue. Is it something in the maya settings I don't have right? I'm using Maya 2016 extension 2.

[damaggio]

First you need to open the targa in photoshop and make sure there's an alpha channel....then we go from there.

Post hypershade connections too.

[Anonymous]

They have alpha channels (unless they need a specific name, the channel is called Alpha 1)

here's the hypershade. I imported the werewolf from Skyrim to see how they did things, so I don't know if Bethesda does anything in particular that might throw things off. I think the diffuse map's alpha carries the opacity/transparency, the normal map's alpha carries specularity, and I'm not sure where sk goes. Apparently it's sub-surface details, so I thought it had something to do with translucency. I really only know how to work with the dx11 shader, so I'm trying to carry over what I know with that.

[Anonymous]

Also yes, I tried using the dx11 shader and had the same sort of problems