[rhettro]

I've progressed enough to figure out just how much I don't understand.

I'm still working on my Naboo Fighter, got the polys cleaned up and fully UV unwrapped in Blender. I'm getting ready to start tackling the textures. Several questions come to mind.

1. Number of textures, it is stated in many places that the designer should use a single texture for his/her model. That makes sense. However, in my case, my model is going to require a diffuse, normal, shine and glow map.  Are these to be combined into a single texture or four separate image files?  Secondly, if the textures are to be multiple, is it good form to keep them all the same dimension, i.e. 512x512, 1024x1024 etc.

2. File format, my perference would be to keep everything in PNG format.  Is it better to convert to the older DDS format as PNG's are already compressed?

I had a couple more questions but they relate back to FSFreaks excelent Blender tut, so I'll post in that thread.

Thanks in advance.

[MarkN]

A 'texture' consist of up to four independent files, with the diffuse, glow, shine, and normal map being separate files, e.g:
Texturex.dds
Texturex-glow.dds
Texturex-shine.dds
Texturex-normal.dds

As far as I understand it each of these files uses exactly the same UV map, so features on each line up.
When people talk about using multiple textures they mean using multiple files of each type with different parts of the UV map on each. When I have seen multiple textures used they have generally not been the same size.

As for file formats, A DDS file is not just a compressed file, and in fact some variants are not compressed, but it is a file that the graphics hardware can use directly, while other file types such as PNG would need conversion in the graphics card driver resulting in a slower loading process and potential for additional compression artifacts due to the effect of converting graphics of one type to another.
While PNG is a very good file type for some graphics types, I would not recommend it's use at all here, as for designing the texture is is much easier to use your graphics progams native format, with layers, for designing the texture and then converting straight to the DDS format that the game uses.

Anyway, well done on getting the model unwrapped as this seems to be a major bottleneck with most models.

[MatthTheGeek]

1. It is stated that the designer should use a single texture, that can be comprised of several maps (diffuse, glow, shine, normals). It works and look much better when the maps are all of the same dimension.

2. DDS is muuuuuuuuuuuuch preferred, as it can be read directly by the GPU. PNG isn't adapted for that job.

EDIT: ninja'd

[rhettro]

A 'texture' consist of up to four independent files, with the diffuse, glow, shine, and normal map being separate files

That makes sense to me, but also seems to be in contrast to what MatthTheGeek just said.  Thanks for the replys.

[MatthTheGeek]

Maps are separate files, that follow a specific naming scheme (yourtexture.dds for your diffuse, then yourtexture-glow.dds, yourtexture-shine.dds, and yourtexture-normal.dds).

[rhettro]

Thanks, you answered my question. 

[FekLeyrTarg]

Here's a good texturing tutorial to create textures for FS2 in GIMP:
http://www.ciinet.org/kevin/wchf/texturetut.html

[rhettro]

I hadn't seen that one, thanks. I'm going to start working on my diffuse texture. I have a pretty good idea how to move forward creating my individual texture files. In the past I've work on dedicated programs to do UV diffuse textures for models. I need to bone up on how "Materials" work in Blender and how UV maps link back to individual materials. 

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I hadn't scene that one, thanks. I'm going to start working on my diffuse texture. I have a pretty good idea how to move forward creating my individual texture files. In the past I've work on dedicated programs to do UV diffuse textures for models. I need to bone up on how "Materials" work in Blender and how UV maps link back to individual materials.

For 2.49: in the Editing tab (F9), "Link and materials" panel, you can assign multiple materials to a single object (New button), and assign which faces should use which material. Once you've set up your materials and unwrapped your model, you can bake the material textures to the UVmap in the Render tab, "Bake" pane, select "Textures".

[Nuke]

sometimes you have to use more than one "material" (we still use the term maps or textures in lieu of an actual materials system where each texture is really just a set of textures), such as for transparent parts. other than that using tiling or multiple textures should be avoided at all costs on most ships (some very large destroyer or larger class ships still might require tiling to look right).

png is not a good format for this application. while it does feature lossless compression, it cannot be decoded on the fly like dxt*, and will be converted and recompressed to the appropriate dxt format at load time. png was meant for web applications and dxt was designed specifically for textures. dds files also contain mipmaps so that they wont need to be generated at load.

of course all this stuff was said before so i dont know what im still doing here.

[rhettro]

png is not a good format for this application. while it does feature lossless compression, it cannot be decoded on the fly like dxt*, and will be converted and recompressed to the appropriate dxt format at load time.

I guess I was thinking that because FSOpen added new support for PNG and PNG's have universal support through different image editors, it would be a good choice. But it is no big deal. Using GIMP to host a texture group, managed over several layers works great and exporting DDS from GIMP is a straight forward process so that is the one I will use.

One the topic of multiple textures, I get it now thanks to everyone's input.

[Nuke]

formats like png are supported but they are generally used for interface graphics such as high resolution backdrops and the like. where compression artifacts are undesirable, but uncompressed files would make the mod very large. however for textures its better to use the more optimized dds files for performance reasons.