Hello! I'm a total noob at this, forgive me. I've researched everything I can think of (youtube, workshop forum, google, wiki...), but I've run into several problems. So much as I can glean, it seems that the importer itself doesn't display paintable AND illuminated masks, though I have seen some folks post images of it working in the workshop. I've dissected the miner's hat .vmt, but as I don't have access to any of that through the importer, I'm really not sure how to set it up. I can figure out paintable, phong and any of that... but when it comes to the magic combination of paint/glow/phong or even just paint/glow, it's maddening!

• If I have one material on the model with the diffuse and black and white alpha (alpha to be used for both paint and glow), the illumination button seems to make everything paintable. Without illumination, the paint and diffuse work as expected.
  
  
• If I have two model materials with diffuse and black/white alpha (32bit), and a duplicate diffuse/alpha called mask (32bit), I can get it to paint just what I want, but it doesn't seem to glow in testmap. I'm not sure the first alpha (non-glow) is even necessary, but it's there.
  
  
• Furthermore, how do you change the lighting in testmap so it's dark?! The whole point of a testmap is to test the model, but I don't think the setup of it is conducive to seeing glow to begin with. Is there another local map somewhere (so I can struggle in isolated shame)? The thought occurred to me that maybe it is working, I'm just not in a dark area.

If I had to just submit to the workshop without being able to see it, I'd at least like to know the files were set up properly. But there's painfully little documentation that says plainly what is what for glow/paint through the importer. Does the art diffuse need an alpha if the glow/paint is in another texture? Does the glow/paint texture need to have a diffuse or can it just be a 24bit mask? How in the heck did anyone get that lovely paintable glow on their workshop items?!

If anyone could donate a screenshot of the importer .vmts and a direct diffuse/alpha/mask description, I would be very grateful. And I will endeavor to pay that kindness forward by helping out in the community once I get a clue. But good golly I feel like I tumbled down the rabbit hole!

Thank you for any help!