I know I said I wasn’t going to explain this but some people do everything the hard way and then complain when it sucks sooooo here goes.
Open up Model Viewer, get your model all equipped up, then click “DAT to MQO”. This will bring up a menu with all available slots, pick then one you need to work with and click OK. Give it a name that makes sense (PLDhands is what I chose) and save.
Open the .dds in GraphicsConverter 3. You should immediately see the transparency in the DAT, so you know this piece needs an alpha map. Go to File > Save As Alpha Channel, and change the suggested name. As per Phabin’s suggestion, I usually just add “a” at the end of the filename to denote “alpha”. So for this example, pldhands0.bmp is suggested, and I save the alpha as pldhands0a.bmp.
Just to be thorough, I always open the alpha map file in photoshop or windows picture viewer to make sure the file is nothing but black areas on a white background. If it is, you’re done with it until you need to apply it in another program. However, sometimes you get funky files that have all kinds of gray areas, like this:
This is the alpha map for Taru female face 5b. I don’t know why this happens, but most tarus faces save like this. Some programs will accept this alpha map and display the face normally, but some won’t. Honestly it’s just easier to go ahead and fix it now than deal with it later. Just paint bucket the gray area white. That’s all!
And there you have it…alpha maps made easy. So save yourself some headache and don’t spend hours creating alpha maps for existing models.