Leaderboard

I think I've got what you are refering to with checkaboard, The image shown in paint.net is the texture with the alpha layer making parts of it transparent. Open the image in Gimp and go to the Channels tab (top Right and deselect the Alpha layer your texture should now be normal. If you now reselect the alpha layer and deselect the red/blue/channels you should then see a black and white image, the white parts are the transparent area of the image (which allows you to see the checkaboard) the black parts show the image. When creating a normal map for the ground textures the rgba channel set up are different to a normal (say building) texture see the tutorial for reference. Diffuse and height are not the same diffuse is colur height is black and white, white is the high point. To create a basic ground texture in Materialize simply import your diffuse and use the default settings for height and normal metallic should be adjusted to near enough black smoothness/edge/AO can be set using default values.