Quick Question about Creating Textures

[fish1999]

Hi all,

I'm having a little trouble with textures, thought I'd see if I could get some feedback. I'm trying to create custom posters, in this case for the Hubris Comics offices. I cloned the existing meshes & textures, all good. Opened the .dds in Photoshop, pasted my new image over the old ones, flattened it and saved it. All the proportions & dpi are fine, I've learned about leaving bits of images hanging off the edge of the canvas and the game just not recognising them. But when I load up the new posters, they're bitty & granulated, even though in photoshop they looked the same quality as the original image. Does anyone have any advice on this, or on which image formats or settings I should be using?

[Chbaakal]

Hi all' date='

I'm having a little trouble with textures, thought I'd see if I could get some feedback. I'm trying to create custom posters, in this case for the Hubris Comics offices. I cloned the existing meshes & textures, all good. Opened the .dds in Photoshop, pasted my new image over the old ones, flattened it and saved it. All the proportions & dpi are fine, I've learned about leaving bits of images hanging off the edge of the canvas and the game just not recognising them. But when I load up the new posters, they're bitty & granulated, even though in photoshop they looked the same quality as the original image. Does anyone have any advice on this, or on which image formats or settings I should be using?

[/quote']

I would usually use DTX5 ARGB 8 bit interpolated alpha with no maps if I made simple posters, but if your quality is reduced I'd use an image larger than the existing poster, shrink or fit the image to the original's size, then try saving that without changing the dds plugin settings. If still grainy, use 16 bit for the image quality of the replacement image.

If there is a NormalMap file (_n.dds) associated with the poster dds, it might be the cause of your problem, since the texturing might make your image look grainy. I'd just change the _n.dds file by choosing a base colour from the image with the eyedropper, then brush over the entire image to make one solid colour.

Hope this helps, mate....

[sen4mi]

Here is my understanding of how to make quality textures:

DXT1 is best for textures without alpha, or with square alpha regions.

DXT3 is just like DXT1 except it gives a few intermediate alpha values.

DXT5 gives smoother alpha regions than DXT3.

In other words, for regular RGB colors, there is no difference between these three formats. They all work by defining small rectangular regions (I think 4x4 pixel patches) and supporting a small number of colors within that range. So certain kinds of images work better than other kinds. But DXT1 is half the size of the other two.

There's also an uncompressed RGB format, but you mostly only want that for some specialized files where numeric precision is important in ways that are unrelated to visual formats. You can use the same number of bits on a higher resolution DXT1 or DXT5 image and get a tradeoff which is usually better for imagery.

You may want to look into using DDSOpt. http://obge.paradice-insight.us/wiki/DDSopt

[Chbaakal]

Here is my understanding of how to make quality textures:

DXT1 is best for textures without alpha' date=' or with square alpha regions.

DXT3 is just like DXT1 except it gives a few intermediate alpha values.

DXT5 gives smoother alpha regions than DXT3.

In other words, for regular RGB colors, there is no difference between these three formats. They all work by defining small rectangular regions (I think 4x4 pixel patches) and supporting a small number of colors within that range. So certain kinds of images work better than other kinds. But DXT1 is half the size of the other two.

There's also an uncompressed RGB format, but you mostly only want that for some specialized files where numeric precision is important in ways that are unrelated to visual formats. You can use the same number of bits on a higher resolution DXT1 or DXT5 image and get a tradeoff which is usually better for imagery.

You may want to look into using DDSOpt. http://obge.paradice-insight.us/wiki/DDSopt

[/quote']

Y'know, all these years of trial and error (a lot of error) and asking around some forums for texturing advice on projects, most of the time I was stuck with half-baked texturing. I even did 6 full recolours of the motorcycles in Fallout3/NV as a resource just for the hell of it, and left them as-is when I couldn't get the environmental cube mapping to show the chrome or the glossy shine (while leaving the seat area alone). NOW someone comes out with a good program that would have made the job a lot easier to deal with, and would have shown me better results overall, for the cycles AND for other projects.

Thank you, sen4mi, for the link. Now, if I actually have time to myself to try this out fully...RL needs to go away for awhile...

[fomorian]

Thanks for the info - loads to go on there!