[Vengence]

I'm using photoshop to do this. I uvw unwrapped a model, skinned everything, then exported with no alpha and with mipmaps. Ingame the texture is invisible. When I convert it to TGA or JPG the skin shows up. I recall doing textures in DDS before and it worked but not this time and not on capital ships. JPG may be small but I believe DDS is better. So any solutions about?

[DaBrain]

Which DXTc format are you using? And which program do you use for it?

[Vengence]

I said I use photoshop. To make things stranger, I used ALL of the DXTc settings and none showed up.

[DaBrain]

So you're using the Nvidia Plugin? Also... the Photoshop version is important. PS 7 has an alpha channel bug. (supposed to be a feature...)

Try the ATI tool "The Compressonator". It has slightly better compression quality due to a never DXT version.

I also found it to cause less problems than the NV plugin.

[Vengence]

Thats strange however. When I exported (Nvidia plug in) before the textures worked just fine. Ok, I'll try out ATI (even though most of my stuff is OpenGL supported Nvidia equipment)

[Nuke]

probibly a good idea to check your file names and be sure they match the texture names in the pof.

the photoshop 7 bug was more with dealing with tga textures, ive never had a dxt not work on me.

[Vengence]

It might be the names. But when I re-exported as jpg with the same name they showed up.

[taylor]

Post one of the problem files and let us take a look to make sure it's not just a format problem.

[Backslash]

Oh, thought of something -- make sure the image dimensions are a power of 2 if you're trying to use DXTc.  If they are not, try using u888.  (should be an option in the plugin)

[Vengence]

The exporter will only export things that are multiples of 4. My latest one is an 800x800 so that should have worked. Also, when I use modified FS2 skins and re-export them they still appear ingame. I'll put my latest skin up for download.

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[Herra Tohtori]

The exporter will only export things that are multiples of 4. My latest one is an 800x800 so that should have worked. Also, when I use modified FS2 skins and re-export them they still appear ingame. I'll put my latest skin up for download.

Actually, common practice is to make textures that are sized in powers of two, not multiples of four (or two). I'm not sure if FS2_Open even shows non-power-of-two textures, so that might be the very problem here. Even if it does it's usually better to use standardized texture sizes - if there's no other reason, at least they are then compatible with more DDS readers/editors.

<Just in case, though I think you know the difference:

Multiples of four -> 1*4, 2*4, 3*4, ... , N*4 are multiples of four.

Powers of two -> 2^1=2 2^2=4, 2^3=8, 2^4=16, 2^5=32, ... , 2^N  are powers of two>

800x800 is not powers of two texture size, because it's not of form 2^X x 2^Y. 1024x1024 would be, because it's 2^10 x 2^10


By the way, what is the converter that you use? I've never heard of one that would require multiples of four texture sizes. GIMP's DDS plugin for one only converts powers of two textures. NVDxt might be able to convert non-standard textures, but there's really no reason to do that IMHO.

[Vengence]

Omg duh! I should have done the math in the first place. I'll try the new size.

EDIT: Well it works. 2048x2048, not 2096. 1024, not 1200.

[taylor]

By the way, what is the converter that you use? I've never heard of one that would require multiples of four texture sizes.

I don't know that I've ever seen one that required multi-of-4 either, but the compression tech does work on a 4x4 block.

GIMP's DDS plugin for one only converts powers of two textures. NVDxt might be able to convert non-standard textures, but there's really no reason to do that IMHO.

The past couple of versions of the GIMP DDS plugin have supported non-power-of-two textures.  nvDXT also supports non-power-of-two for the previous couple of versions.

FS2_Open doesn't support non-power-of-two compressed DDS though.  It will work for some people, and crash for others, but our only choice was just to not load such images period.  So, any of the compressed formats (DXT*) will be required to be power-of-2, but any of the uncompressed formats can be power-of-2 or not and they will still work (the game will convert them to power-of-2 if needed).

[Nuke]

the latest version of the dds plugin has a checkbox to remove the power of 2 restriction. i guess some games/cards can handle it.

i just noticed that my 8800gts suports textures all the way up to 8192*8192 (thats a 2 gig tga, or 200 megs if you save ti as a dxt1 w/o mips). holy ****!

[Cobra]

Holy **** indeed!

[Scooby_Doo]

OMG
i wouldn't need to drop my textures down from 2048 to 1024.  Just imagine how detailed textures you could do with caps then 

[Nuke]

its so big the nvidia dds plugin cant save them, ive tried, im sure theres another way though, converting a tga with some stand alone converter perhaps.

i hear quake wars will use such textures for terrain maps. the engine can sub-devide them depending on the players max supported texture res.

[Taristin]

Perhaps the Compressonator?

[Nuke]

maybe. seriously ive done 4096^2s and i tell you you spend most of your time twideling your thumbs waiting for the effects you just applied to display. hard drive thrash and max cpu usage all the way. if you want to make textures that big effietiently, youre gonna need a real powerfull workstation to do it, like with a pair of quad core processors and about 8 gigs of ram. the psd for the ragnarok texture is over 500 megs, so youd probibly want fast hard drives in a striped array as well.

i like wat id is doing though, one texture to cover an entire level, entire level worth of terrain done in 1 texture pass. if your computer cant support it, well then it will chop it up and do it in 4 or 16 passes. sence my card only has about 640 megs of memory you could use 3 tops, though i doubt youd want to. i wonder if it would be possible to do this in freespace. an entire jug on a single texture. if youve got the card to crunch that texture your looking at a 20 km long ship done in a single pass. hella cool

[Vengence]

My 2048x2048 textures were exported just fine with NO alphas anyways. They work perfectly and are great looking on these 6km long ships. The huge skin was definately necessary for this job for the details needed. But this is nothing. I once rendered to texture a 4096x4096 skin for a FIGHTER! Just to show how bad it is until you unwrap it yourself.