alpha-blend I would guess in opengl alpha-test is used for the 1bit stuff, and blend is used for blending (decal,additive... whatever) of a surface on top of the framebuffer. alphatest is fast because it can replace the pixel below, whilst alphablend will need the previous drawn pixel and mix it with the new one
On the game I am currently working on we save 32bit .tga with alpha channel included these get converted to 8bit colour in the pipe, or 4bit if you want. I'm an environment artist though not a character artist so I could imagine the process would be quite different depending on your render engine and what pipe makes sense…
[ QUOTE ] I'm not following with the green normal channel because I don't know what it's supposed to look like normally. Perhaps a screenshot of the channel would help with pointing it out [/ QUOTE ] Just use swizzle "X+Y-Z+" in the xNormal 3d viewer slot, that will invert your green channel automatically, Then grab a…