[--Steve-O--]

ok here's the skinny. the difference bettween stock textures and edited textures. the stock textures are always relatively well illuminated no matter what side the sun is on...the edited one on the other hand light up really well when facing the sun, but is really dark on the opposite side, as in this picture?
why is this?
i've got MV stuff loaded...the modified textures are PCX...does format make a difference?

[Vasudan Admiral]

no. inless its a targa/dds with an alpha channles/mipmaps no. (except that one thing...its technical.)

....what?


Anyways, format wise you'll want to save your textures as DXT1 versions of DDS unless you need to save an alpha (transparency) chanel.

Textures are currently made up of 3 main parts:
The most important and only mandatory one is the texture itself. After that you have the shine and glowmaps. Shine maps are basically what you would see if you shone a strong light at the base texture - which parts would gleam and which wouldn't. That kinda thing. There's a shine map visible on what you've labeled the stock texture in that image - the bright X shape there.

Shinemaps also control environment mapping through their alpha channel. That is, which parts of the texture are supposed to be reflective. (Black is no reflection, white is full reflection)
If you want an alpha channel on your shinemap, you'll need to save it as a DXT3 version of DDS. If you don't need alpha mapping, be sure to save it as a DXT1 with 0 alpha - or else it will end up with the flying mirror syndrome seen in the triton, aeolus and lucifer in the 3.6.8 media VPs.

Glowmaps are simply the bits of the base texture that you want to glow. Anything on a glowmap will always be rendered at full brightness in game. (A glowmap is entirely black except for the features on it like lights or windows.)

[takashi]

what about .tga? it does just as well with shinemaps. not everyone has a .dds converter.

[Vretsu]

*bangs head on keyboard*

[Unknown Target]

Takashi, please just shut up. For your information you can grab a DDS plugin for Photoshop from Nvidia's website! You're wrong - again

Steve, it sounds like you have no shine/glow maps for your custom textures. Do you want them to be like the stock textures, or the stock textures like your textures? And are you using the Media VPs?

EDIT: On top of that, he's asking a worthwhile question - unlike your random nonsense.

[Water]

ok here's the skinny. the difference bettween stock textures and edited textures. the stock textures are always relatively well illuminated no matter what side the sun is on...the edited one on the other hand light up really well when facing the sun, but is really dark on the opposite side, as in this picture?
why is this?
i've got MV stuff loaded...the modified textures are PCX...does format make a difference?

Format make a difference? - NO

I think you are chasing an illusion.

It is likely from that image that you are confusing "well illuminated" with use of texture.
If you look at the dark grey bits in the stock texture you will find they are more patterned than yours.
Have a real good look at the stock texture. It is dark grey with black lines and matching light grey lines (bevel effect) It is also surrounded by heavily defined white areas.

Now look at your texture. It is almost a monotone grey. There isn't really any light areas to pop out.
It also seems very blurry, as if the texture is to small for the area it covers (to match the stock texture resolution)

[Herra Tohtori]

Texture format can and does have an effect on how the texture looks like and how fast they are rendered.

PCX textures are indexed to use 256 colours and they pretty much suck because they still use as much memory as a 24-bit TGA of the same resolution. Additionally, the indexing eats colour depth.

TGA files are bloody big and thus take a lt of HD space and can take a lot of memory, but not any more than a PCX or JPG of the same image size. But TGA's also have the best image quality especially in effect textures that use a lot of smooth gradients.

DDS files are for most purposes the absolut best texture format. Especially for large ship textures with few gradients. The compression is usually rather good, but the main advantage is AFAIK that the GPU can handle them directly in their compressed form, which means that the memory load will be something like 1/4 of uncompressed images (depending on what there is in the image, obviously. Also, as was already said, if there's no need for transparency, basic texture and glowmaps should be DXT1a compressed (and also some effects that don't use alpha blending properly yet, like the beam textures). If the purpose requires alpha channel, then use DXT5 compression... or DXT3, if you deem it good enough, basically they are the same but DXT3 has less depth in alpha channel.

JPG... just don't use jpg textures. They might be small to transfer, but the compression artefacts are far worse than with DDS textures, and they use the same amount of RAM as uncompressed textures.


Obviously there is no way any format can magically make crap textures look any better, but it does have an effect on how good a texture can look. There's really no contest between 8-bit and 24-bit colour.

[Water]

but it does have an effect on how good a texture can look. There's really no contest between 8-bit and 24-bit colour.

oops forgot about that part. Was too focused on the main cause of the problem.

[takashi]

happy UT? no more nonsense.

[Snail]

Why the **** does your text say

"bow down?"

[Mobius]

Wow, every single thread is about takashi.

I don't know if this can help you, but...I'm experiencing the same problem with some models.... I use the specular effect and only part of the textures of some ships are affected by the effect.

[Turey]

Is your model mirrored? Do the sides of the model overlap on the UV map?