Silly Texture Editing Question...

Okay, I'm posting as a last resort...maybe someone will take pity on me, lol

So, after searching high and low for a perfect horse coat mod, I decided to try my hand at making my own. I followed a guide I found on Nexus mods, and I'm so frustrated by this point I'm ready to just call it quits. And I may anyway, lol. There's a serious lack of resources for people wanting to get into modding...

I'm wanting to edit a storymode horse. Literally all I want is to add a specific white marking on the DB Turk's face. I found one mod which came super close to what I wanted but they altered the whole color of the horse to make it more red-bay...literally all I want. Is to add a marking on the face. I do not want anything else added.

So anyway, I go through the whole process of drawing my marking on the face texture ytd file in Gimp (though for the life of me I can't figure out if I'm painting it on the right layer, or the right color, because white isn't white apparently...? Since black = no color? Idk man), using the texture toolkit to extract my files, yadda yadda I followed the guide to a T. I moved the new .ytd file to my stream folder, booted up the game, nothing. No changes to the horse. Do I need the DB Turk's corresponding .ymt file as well? The tutorial didn't say anything about that. However I tried with one of my attempts and it didn't seem to change anything. I tried painting on the red layer. However my feeble attempts at matching to the body map seems to be the socks are on the green layer...

help. I'd love to learn how to make my own custom horse coats since I'm usually pretty particular about what I want, but there's so little out there for resources and honestly at the end of the tutorial I kind of felt like the person skipped a step since they went straight from adding the .ytd file to the stream folder directly into the game. Every time I've downloaded a custom coat, there's been both a ymt file - the horse it's replacing - and sometimes a ytd file for custom textures.

I'm about to attempt to find an active horse modder and commission them for one little head marking if I can't find something 😅 I'd really rather just learn how to do it myself.

Edited 10 hours ago10 hr by nomiem