Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Erebus Alpha on April 21, 2016, 01:26:11 am
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I am in the process of making edits to the Shivan ships' glowmaps, using GIMP. When I opened the Dragon's .dds glowmap, I noticed a few white speckles on the image. When I saved it and put it in my mod folder - the white speckles appeared on the ship itself.
I figured, what the hell, people probably will not be looking that closely at the Dragon anyway.
Next ship on the list is the Basilisk. I open its glowmap, and suddenly, all the glowing green bits have tiny speckles EVERYWHERE. I made my edits, saved it, and the result was just as terrible as I had predicted.
Because these are on a glowmap, they make tiny glowing white dots everywhere on the ship.
The distribution of the white dots is not entirely random either. They occur right at the boundary between solid black and really dim glows. I zoomed WAY into the dots, and discovered that they are actually pieces of the image that are completely transparent (the checkered background). Almost like the compression was too aggressive and stripped tiny bits of the image out.
I'm not really familiar enough with image editing to get a brush to color over transparent stuff only and leave the rest of the image alone. And I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of .vp files, the intricacies of .dds, or the guts of GIMP to do anything but guess at what might be going wrong.
Has anyone encountered this problem before?
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DDS is a lossy format, each time you modify & save it it'll lose quality. That might be what's happening here. It's best to work with the original loseless files (e.g. png) however you'd need to contact the FSU team regarding that as these files aren't distributed with the mediavp (afaik).
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Also, IIRC gimp's dds compression thingy is notoriously bad.
Some command line tools might give better results.
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Your description is vague, but if the problem is indeed that you simply have some fully transparent pixels, then just create a pure black background layer behind it and merge with that.
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Thanks, the pure black background layer & merge worked perfectly!
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Something is wrong with MjnMixael's image converting methods. Both Dragon, Basilisk and numerous other models textured by him have the same issue for unknown reasons. Current MVPs are full of this issue. Missing polys are supposed to be fully black.
Keep in mind this while editing not only shivan ships, but also Poseidon, it's cargo containers and some other models and remember to save your DDSes with no alpha in DXT1 format for the best compression.
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I found that single-layer DXT1 compression works best at two things:
- Prevents the missing-white-speckle effect from ever returning when opening the image in the future
- Makes shinemaps easier to manage and recolor; what you see is what you get.