Texture appears black in the Construction Set but works fine in-game

[GamerRick]

3 hours ago, RomanR said:

@GamerRick

Interesting program, however link to discussion in most recent comment which is discussing differences between DXT1-5 compressions raises some questions. Did you try using this program for textures using some sort of transparency or smooth gradiends of color, GameRick? How they did look like after?

It does not work well on skin textures.  Quite bad actually.  I'm not sure what else you may be referring to.  I use Photoshop CS2 and the last version of Nvidia's plugin that works with it.  I usually use PS when it's one or a just a few texture(s) that need adjusting or when I am creating one myself.

It works better than DDSOpt on most though.

Edited March 15 by GamerRick

[RomanR]

@GamerRick

Well, that comment pointed out to this topic. It got me thinking that under some conditions the DXT1 compression could be used to decrease size of texture even further without significant visual loss of quality. Still as I'm not a graphician of any sort, so I had an idea to ask you, as you brought it up recommending that Optimizer Textures program and you have more experience.  I hope you didn't mind. 

 Perhaps with today's GBs of VRAM available, such discussion doesn't matter much anyway.

[GamerRick]

For Oblivion, I use DXT1 for textures that don't have a transparency alpha channel, and DXT5 for those that do.  I have heard that DXT1 can cause more detail loss because of the stronger compression, but have not verified this myself.

Using DXT5 instead, even for textures without the alpha channel, won't hurt anything. I did this in FO3 following the advice of PixelHate, who knows more than me about these things.

I am still playing on the computer I built in 2010.  I am on the 3rd graphics card (which is the only thing that broke over the years).  My latest one is an AMD 570 with 4GB vram.  Going from a 1GB card to a 4GB card made a big difference in all of the Bethesda games.

Edited March 17 by GamerRick

[LenaWolfBravil]

4 hours ago, GamerRick said:

For Oblivion, I use DXT1 for textures that don't have a transparency alpha channel, and DXT5 for those that do.  I have heard that DXT1 can cause more detail loss because of the stronger compression, but have not verified this myself.

I used to do this as well because I read somewhere about it But now I use DXT5 for all textures. I think your second sentence is the wrong way around because DXT5 files are much smaller than DXT1 files, meaning that DXT5 has stronger compression.

Looking at vanilla DDS files, they are almost all in DXT5, which is why I switched to DXT5 as well.

[GamerRick]

1 hour ago, LenaWolfBravil said:

I used to do this as well because I read somewhere about it But now I use DXT5 for all textures. I think your second sentence is the wrong way around because DXT5 files are much smaller than DXT1 files, meaning that DXT5 has stronger compression.

Looking at vanilla DDS files, they are almost all in DXT5, which is why I switched to DXT5 as well.

Interesting.  Shows how much I actually know about the DXT formats. 

[AndalayBay]

Here's the CS wiki page on DDS formats from the UESP copy since the actual CS wiki is still down. I wouldn't say that most textures are DXT5. They are used for armour and probably weapons where you use transparency to render the shine. Textures that don't require transparency are DXT1.

[LenaWolfBravil]

3 hours ago, AndalayBay said:

Textures that don't require transparency are DXT1.

This made me go and double check. You are correct and also @GamerRick is correct that DXT5 makes larger files than DXT1. I've had the opposite experience previously but that was probably because those mod-added textures had not been exported correctly and GIMP fixed them. Live and learn.

PS. I am sceptical about the Wiki because of the large number of mistakes in it.

[GamerRick]

My understanding is that DXT5 is more loss-less than DXT1, which means that DXT5 should result in a larger file.  However, once a file is saved in DXT1, you can't get the detail back by switching to DXT5.  So, the decision has to be made before the image is saved in any compressed format.  The same would apply to images saved in the JPEG format, which has selectable levels of compression.

My success in manually downsizing images in Photoshop isn't better than what Optimizer Textures can do, and I have visually compared the results from OT and DDSOpt to conclude that the former produces images with better detail and contrast.

Edited March 18 by GamerRick

[AndalayBay]

10 hours ago, LenaWolfBravil said:

This made me go and double check. You are correct and also @GamerRick is correct that DXT5 makes larger files than DXT1. I've had the opposite experience previously but that was probably because those mod-added textures had not been exported correctly and GIMP fixed them. Live and learn.

PS. I am sceptical about the Wiki because of the large number of mistakes in it.

What mistakes? Don't forget that the wiki is for the original CS. The CSE fixes a lot of bugs and adds new features.

I've found that it's more a matter of people not knowing what stuff means. I was going to update the wiki, but I couldn't log in. Then Bethesda moved it again and now it's offline.

[LenaWolfBravil]

9 minutes ago, AndalayBay said:

What mistakes? Don't forget that the wiki is for the original CS. The CSE fixes a lot of bugs and adds new features.

No, it's not about the CS versus CSE, it's about functions and OBSE events. I wanted to make corrections as well but couldn't create an account. Of course now I no longer remember the details, but one area of concern was around ModActorValue and related functions. Some of the descriptions are incorrect. Another area is inventory handling - stacks of items. It may also be that OBSE was changed in the meantime, they've been attempting to fix the same bug in this area for the past three releases or so, just check the changelog.

Similarly, I found that some of the events are not fully described as you could not write a handler based solely on that. Again, this is new stuff and no one could update it.