Help with texture editing

[Selenity]

So I was trying to make myself a custom elvaan female haircolor .dat for my elvaan (there is no good elvaan female head mods out there that i can find anywhere) and I also wanted to change her eye color.

Now for my problem - I use F6-A right now and while it's almost the style I want (I would love it to be longer but i can't do modeling to save my life) it's not the color I'd like it to be - I want a snowy white color. So I tried to make it myself - that being said it turned out fairly bad in my opinion - the white-ness went too far on the face and I had a hard time selecting the color actual hair parts to be rather difficult to select - wand or manually as I can't really tell which parts are the hair - and what parts give the hair shape. And also my white - looked to be too white. The color I wanted was similar to the Mithra's heads F6-A, F2-B/A and F3-A. Basically a pretty snowy white color - or at least a pale pale blonde.

However the eye color I wanted came out perfect - a slightly greyed out but still vivid pink.

So does anyone have any tips in hair selecting - specifically for that model so I can make my hair perfect - and fit how I think my Elvaan looks like. Specially if it includes making the hair longer (Women of every race should have long hair ><).

Also any tips for selecting a mithra - because I also want to make a custom model for a mithra head for my buddy. Personalyl I want to make her have black hair, yellow eyes, and if I can figure out - make an eye patch type thing covering on of her eyes.

Sounds crazy huh?

Well any tips is very welcomed - thank you.

[Stromgarde]

Re: Help with texture editing

The eyepatch is a no-go. All the mithra models use a mirrored half-wireframe for the heads.

[Selenity]

Re: Help with texture editing

lol thanks - well I think I may of figured out what went wrong - I think I may of screwed up the alpha texture or whatever that is that determines if the hair looks fringed or not.

So though does anyone know how to extend/length hair to make it longer - like you see in many of the japanse head models?

EDIT: So I tried following Phabin's guide on doing transparents in a model - and they arn't showing up. I opened the original file model I'm basing my mithra headmod off of (F5-A).
I saved the original file as an alpha channel after making a copy of the original file to edit. Then I edited the file (Removed markings from the face - added green eyes, changed the ribbon to green - and made the hair black) and then followed his instructions to apply the alpha and save it as a .dds. However when I go to return it to a .dat file so I can apply the model in the game- none of the hair transparencies show up. It's all just blocky.

Here's a zip to the files I made - if someone could help me fix it I'd be very thankful and happy.

http://www.eternity-forever.net/crap/mithrablack.zip

Here's what she actually looks (you can see the transparancy problem)