BioWare Official TGA > DDS Converter Release thread

[Darth_Sapiens 90]

seeing as for some reason, tool file uploads do not get a thread automatically, this thread is for my recent upload of BioWare's official dds tools. this thread is the release thread.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Hmmm... doesn't work that great. Some dds texture look pretty bad in-game

[Malkior 476]

Is there perhaps a guide to get the most out of DDS files, such as optimizing mipmaps?

[djnugent 34]

Used it for a PC texture (PMCA01/D1/D2) - simple, easy. In -> Out. Nuff said. Texture looked good to me, but I didn't scrutinize over TGA vs DDS in-game

   - processing time was nice and fast too.

 

I'm going to test with the HD Nihilus mod to see if it eliminates that brief 3-5 second pause before loading the main menu at the game-start screen.

 

Thank you!

[Darth_Sapiens 90]

glad it's being put to good use

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Used it for a PC texture (PMCA01/D1/D2) - simple, easy. In -> Out. Nuff said. Texture looked good to me, but I didn't scrutinize over TGA vs DDS in-game

   - processing time was nice and fast too.

 

I'm going to test with the HD Nihilus mod to see if it eliminates that brief 3-5 second pause before loading the main menu at the game-start screen.

 

Thank you!

Did you do anything special to the textures beforehand? Mine looked pretty bad. I'll post screenshots when I get home.

 

EDIT: Totally my bad.

 

The textures are good, I just totally had some weird lightmaps in my override. Looking pretty good!

 

EDIT: Some look good. Others not.

 

Looks like it's related to whether or not some tgas are exported as 24 bit or 32 bit. Basically, from now on, if we're going to use this tool, no RLE compression should be used.

[djnugent 34]

@ VP - no, I didn't have to change anything, except for resize the image to something that was the power of 2. It wasn't for any models, only NPC heads

 

 

@ DS - Just an FYI - I ran the HD Darth Nihilus .TGA files through the converter and put them in override - it has eliminated that pause on the loading screen, so thank you!

 *I had to resize N_darthnihh.tga to 4096x4096 (I didn't want to lose any of the HD, so I elected to go way up instead of way down). Still doesn't lag... 

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

@ VP - no, I didn't have to change anything, except for resize the image to something that was the power of 2. It wasn't for any models, only NPC heads

 

 

@ DS - Just an FYI - I ran the HD Darth Nihilus .TGA files through the converter and put them in override - it has eliminated that pause on the loading screen, so thank you!

 *I had to resize N_darthnihh.tga to 4096x4096 (I didn't want to lose any of the HD, so I elected to go way up instead of way down). Still doesn't lag... 

Yeah, it was a combination of wonky lightmaps and poor conversion of the tgas. To convert correctly without issues, the textures must be non-RLE compression. I had a Darth Nihilus skin as well that was using the compression, but re-saving it without the compression allowed it to convert correctly.

 

I wonder if we should advise the use of .dds over tga from now on? Clearly we should keep tgas in some format or another in each mod, but dds performs far better and seems to have a drastic improvement on performance, especially entire area reskins and HD textures.

[djnugent 34]

Yeah, it was a combination of wonky lightmaps and poor conversion of the tgas. To convert correctly without issues, the textures must be non-RLE compression. I had a Darth Nihilus skin as well that was using the compression, but re-saving it without the compression allowed it to convert correctly.

 

I wonder if we should advise the use of .dds over tga from now on? Clearly we should keep tgas in some format or another in each mod, but dds performs far better and seems to have a drastic improvement on performance, especially entire area reskins and HD textures.

 

All I know is...now I'm going to have to go through all of my TGA's and resize them to 1024² to 4096² so I can convert them all to DDS, which is going to take FOREVER...as I've got about.... 40-50 mods currently installed...

 

Actually...I just did a count... I have 67 mods installed, about 2/3 of which is JUST textures, not including any that have MDL and TXI files as well... Holy crapola. didn't realize it was that humongous... 

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

All I know is...now I'm going to have to go through all of my TGA's and resize them to 1024² to 4096² so I can convert them all to DDS, which is going to take FOREVER...as I've got about.... 40-50 mods currently installed...

 

Actually...I just did a count... I have 67 mods installed, about 2/3 of which is JUST textures, not including any that have MDL and TXI files as well... Holy crapola. didn't realize it was that humongous...

You shouldn't have to change from 1024 to 4096, like, at all. Any textures that are non-powers of 2 you would have to convert, but if it already is PO2, there's no need to upscale at all.

[djnugent 34]

You shouldn't have to change from 1024 to 4096, like, at all. Any textures that are non-powers of 2 you would have to convert, but if it already is PO2, there's no need to upscale at all.

 

Right, mistype - Meant change to 1024 OR 4096 :-P

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Right, mistype - Meant change to 1024 OR 4096 :-P

Gotcha lol

 

Yeah, if they don't have textures that are PO2, then they won't even convert. I'm wondering if rectangular shapes with PO2 (example, 64x512) look fine? I didn't check real closely, but I think they converted, not sure how they're displaying in-game though.

[djnugent 34]

So... I did something stupidly awesome yesterday... By stupid, I mean dumb, and by awesome, I mean very informative(for me...). I wasn't sure where to stick some of this, but since most of it is related to the TGA>DDS Converter I thought I'd put it in this thread.

• If everybody already knows all of this, then that just proves how far behind the curve I am... 

 

I was thinking about how textures needed to be resized to be the square root of something in order to be processed by DDS converter. Except I was getting errors with anything that wasn't 1024² or 4096². Then it hit me - sq rt of 4096 = 64 , 1024 = 32, 256 = 16, etc ---- WHICH ALL EQUALS PROCESSOR (or Game-Engine Processing) ARCHITECTURE.

 

So all textures have to be equal to 2², 4², 8², 16², 32², or 64² (pixels = 4x4, 16x16, 64x64, 256x256, 1024x1024, 4096x4096 respectively, and ONLY THESE SIZES will work with the TGA > DDS Converter. 

• Other sizes will obviously work if kept in TGA format

I tried coverting something that was 128² (which is where the stupid/dumb part comes in...hyuck hyuck!!!) which ends up equaling 16384x16384 pixels. 

• First of all, I don't recommend trying this - Adobe PS had my system (6-Core AMD + 8GB DDR3 RAM + NVidia GeForce GTX 710) completely maxed out on all resources just trying to process & modify an image that high-res, and the file size ended up being 1GB, soooo..... do it at your own risk...

And here's where I need some help - I edited the TGA for PCHMA01 at that resolution. I sharpened and cleaned up as many of the facial details as best as I could (which took about an hour to process because of the size). I had the hair and goatee so sharpened up that it actually looked like HAIR. Then I reduced the image size back down to 4096x4096, converted to DDS, and saved to my override folder.

 

When viewing the PC in-game, his hair (the hair that I super-sharpened) shimmered and I'm not entirely sure why...like now it was picking up on a bumpmap or cubemap - my understanding of texture-maps is below novice, at best. 

 

So... am I right? What made them shimmer/sparkle? I've read numerous forums regarding mappings, and I think I'm close to something kinda big here (maybe just big for me... ) without enough general knowledge to be able to clearly dictate what is actually happening.

 

Feel free to PM me or re-submit this to another thread if needed.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Screenshots will probably help.

 

I don't honestly see why increasing the resolution of a texture will matter after a certain point.

[djnugent 34]

 

Screenshots will probably help.

 

I don't honestly see why increasing the resolution of a texture will matter after a certain point.

 

Screenshots, I know - not in front of my computer when I wrote this...

 

Detail - better the resolution, the finer I can make lines and details. I don't know, on MINE it seems to make a big difference in how pixelated the textures look. At 4096² in TGA they are slow to load and can be a little twitchy on animations. However, in 4096² in DDS they look great (compared to 1024² & 512²).

 

I'll try to get some screenshots together 2nite.

[ Mod Note: Please don't double-post. There is an "Edit" button at the lower-right of each of your posts. In the future, please refer to the Site Rules. Thank you. ]

and...guessing by the overwhelming response, I'm thinking that all of my previous post is common knowledge and I'm showing off my newbie-ism...

[Rece 63]

and...guessing by the overwhelming response, I'm thinking that all of my previous post is common knowledge and I'm showing off my newbie-ism... 

 

You commented 2 minutes after your first one, first of all I'd edit the comment, and second of all you didn't even give anyone time to reply

[Vriff 21]

Anything 2^x should work.

[djnugent 34]

You commented 2 minutes after your first one, first of all I'd edit the comment, and second of all you didn't even give anyone time to reply

 

Relax everybody - I was just poking fun at myself, wasn't supposed to sound like I was crying for some acknowledgement. Getting a late start on learning how to do any kind of modding so I'm WAY behind the curve here... 

 

And my bad on the double posting, thank you for fixing it 

[Fair Strides 509]

Relax everybody - I was just poking fun at myself, wasn't supposed to sound like I was crying for some acknowledgement. Getting a late start on learning how to do any kind of modding so I'm WAY behind the curve here... 

 

And my bad on the double posting, thank you for fixing it 

Hopefully I didn't sound snappy when I wrote that...

[Jorak Uln 458]

Ive tried out the conversion tool for this texture: 

 

1024x1024:

 

 

 

its power of 2, but - however, take a look at the floor:

 

with tga:

 

 

with dds:

 

 

(Note, that the white grainy pixels over the screens are from my graphics card and have nothing to do with it)

 

any idea why its not working?

[Kexikus 995]

Maybe your texture had TGA compression or had the wrong number of bits (I don't remember if they have to be 24 or 32^^).

[DarthParametric 3,783]

24bit is RGB, 32bit is RGBA (8 bits per channel). The converter handles both.

[Jorak Uln 458]

the texture seems to be 1024x1024x32 -> 32 bit one. Its also a non-transparent one.

 

Btw, in this article i read that there seem to be different settings for .dds that are particulary good/bad in handling for example transparency:

 

DDS DXT1:  

 

 Low levels of loss in RGB channel, only supports 1-bit alpha. Great compression, and uses 1/4 of the texture RAM of lossless formats. Ideal for items that aren't using detailed alpha channels. 

Hard to use, if you want professional results. All of the DDS formats require quite a bit of practice to get good results out of the filtering available in the DDS plugins / conversion tools available. If you don't have Photoshop, I recommend using the plugin for GIMP or ATi's Compressionator application, to get good control over the settings. However, I'm just going to be real and say that, having tried all of that out... the Photoshop plugin is markedly superior, in terms of detailed control.

DDS DXT3: Low levels of loss in the RGB channel, alpha is lossy 8-bit but tends to come out "crisp", due to compression algorithm used. Uses half the texture RAM of lossless formats. Needs sharpening applied to mips for good results, and tends to work best if you accept some high contrast where you might want subtlety ideally. Good for "glow" style teamcolor, where the alpha compression is acceptable, but works fairly poorly for "paint" style, where you need more subtle alphas. 

Can sometimes cause major artifacts in RGB channel (blocks of area where the compression method doesn't handle the area well), which are very hard to get rid of.

DDS DXT5: RGB channel is usually a little more lossy than DXT3. Alpha channel is more "soft" than DXT3. Uses half the texture RAM of lossless formats. DXT5 is tricky, and you may have to adjust sharpness / contrast between mips per piece, due to the way that the compression works- it's not as consistent as DXT3, in terms of artifacts.

Alpha is better for "paint" style teamcolor. Works far worse for "glow". Artifacts may shift color values enough that it's a problem for texture2, where tiny changes in RG values make a big difference in terms of what you see in the engine.

Can sometimes cause major artifacts in RGB channel (blocks of area where the compression method doesn't handle the area well), which are very hard to get rid of.

 

 

Anyway, i still dont know why its not working?

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

The texture is compressed. Save it without compression first and then use the converter.

[LiliArch 115]

I've got similar issues (among other issues that have caused dds being less useful for me). Weird thing is, it seems to pick one texture file and screw it, and nothing I do to the file seems to fix it. And I've made sure that all of the files have been saved with perfectly same settings, and are of perfectly same size.