Hello! I am incredibly new to the world of creating (or rather copying and uploading) maps for the SteamVR environments, and the most common issue I've been running into so far is material alpha layers.

The first issue I run into is that I will import a material, Hammer seemingly adds bright purple coloring to a transparent file and when I try to apply an alpha to render it out, it renders everything but the new color out. I've checked the original file, attempted to replace the imported file, and tweaked every setting I can think of. I know this color is commonly associated with the missing skybox texture, but beyond that I have no idea why it's being added. Here's pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/y99t7wI

The second issue I run into is similar, but instead of adding the purple color, it adds a color already from the file to the background, which then does not dissolve into transparency properly, making materials look broken. Again, no idea why it's doing this or why it selected this color from the file to fill the background. Here are more pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/7Ib5usr

So I come from more of a filmmaking background, so my reference point for transparency and colors comes back to chroma keying, where you can make the program erase a color and make a video transparent (this is how green/blue screens work). Is there something equivalent I can be doing with Hammer to fix my texture issues? Is it an issue with the files I can work around? Any help would be appreciated!