Alpha channel question

[unniebee]

I'm trying to create an Invisible Flairs mod. In theory, all I would need to do would be to turn the entire Flairs texture invisible (masked) using the Alpha channel, but in practice, I can't get it to work.

 

I know this method works for other textures to remove parts, such as the Admiral Coat No Sword mod and most dress retextures that don't have a sash. The vanilla diffuse does already have an alpha channel on it, but it's empty. When I fill it with black, nothing changes. When I fill it with white, nothing changes. When I make a selection of part of the texture and load it into the Alpha channel, nothing changes.

 

I know that the modded texture is loading because changes I make to the RGB channels show up, but the Alpha channel seems to have no effect no matter what I do.

 

In theory I could shrink the actual models of the flairs on all the armors to make them invisible, but the texture method, if i could get it to work, would be way less time consuming, much smaller in filesize, and have much less conflict with other mods, so I'd really like to get this working.

 

Is this impossible, or am I missing something? I'm using the same Mod Manager version I've used for all my other texture edits, which I believe is v.16.