   Alpha Texture?
  Can I do transparency with the alpha channel of my diffuse texture?Can I do transparency with a seperate transparency texture ( 0 = opaque to 255 = transparent)?Is one better than the other?If I do the latter, how can I optimize such that the texture only uses the one byte in application code and shader code?   
  Why would you want to use a second texture for the alpha value and double your texture loading time? Just be sure to use a texture format that can support RGBA (like tga for instance).   ;  Because online research is confusing :)I read "Often a seperate alpha map is used for tranparency"I wondered why or if there was something I was missing. Of course, I thought doesn't DirectX support TGA which has an alpha channel? Maybe they were referring to some other software that only supports RGB. I have to make sure on all these things.