Image Viewers for newer DDS file types (BC7 etc)?

[arahat]

I am looking for a Window image viewer that supports the newer dds formats like BC7 that are used in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. Older dds formats are reasonably well supported by viewers (IrfanView, XnView,WTV, Imagine for Total Commander) and convertors (eg Ordenador), but so far I cannot find a program to quickly view a texture or directory of textures. There are plugins for various image editors now, but they are far too cumbersome for just viewing and evaulating the textures from various mods. Irfan, WTC and Imagine say invalid type/unknown format while XnView displays a hallucinogenic mosaic image of various blobs of colour.

 

The closest I could find was Fallout 4 DDS Image Viewer by Sir Garnon, but it doesn't work like a standard file viewer that can be associated with a filetype on Windows (the way your average Jpeg viewer does); it only supports one prefined directroy and is designed to compared large texture packs to Bethesda's own textures. I'm not 100% sure it supports BC6 or 7; Skyrim Image Viewer doesn't seem to be able to parse BC7.

 

 

Edit: Delving a little deeper, the main compression formats used for DirectX 9 games were DXT1 (for an RGB with no alpha channel) and DXT5 (for RGB with an alpha channel). In DirectX 10, DXT1 is called BC1, and DXT5 is BC3. I'm not sure about BC5, whether it is new or old, only a post with someone recommending it for specular _s.dds .

 

DDS itself is like a container (a la mp4, mkv) which can store different codec compressed contents. The old tools cannot recognize files encded with the BC6 or BC7 codecs (BC5?). The best introductory article I have found so far is: http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/understanding-bcn-texture-compression-formats/#bc6-and-bc7

 

DirectX 10 is old (2006?) but these newer DDS codecs are still lacking support.

Edited August 16, 2019 by arahat

[stickbow]

I'm mainly posting to keep this active. I use WTV, and it usually thinks it's opening BC7 files, but doesn't. I would love a viewer -- and would even more love a GIMP plugin to actually open, edit and save with BC7.

[arahat]

Thanks for the support. We urgently need someone with the proper skillset to be able to shoehorn in support for BC5 to BC7 to existing image viewers, and .There have been request threads opened on irfanView and XnView forums, but noone seems to care :(

 

Also useful tools like Ordenador and DDSOptimizer need BC7 support. I was just using Ordenador an hour ago to remove useless alpha channels from a lot of the dds textures released by Mystirious Dawn. If anyone is curious, you need to click Options for Mod makers > Remove Invisible Mask, to purge to alpha channels carrying no useful data from these textures (in WTC the useless alphas were pure magenta and doubling the file size, real alpha maps have detail).