Texture artifacts

[CaBaL120]

there's no way to rescue black from artifacts above all if you're recompressing a dds from a dds... but also from xcf or psd or tga or png to dds... there are some small tweaks you can use...i'm not very used to gimp but in photoshop you can apply filter-disturb...a small amount of this filter will be barely visible igame but would greatly improve final results.

reason of artifacts is often the lack of small details on the surface...when dds compression find a large part without detail it usually adds streaks and spots...so you could also use the dodge-burn tool to add some very small details... like damage or reflections.

keep in mind also that complete black does not exist in real life...only variation or lack of lights... better to keep some areas very dark...without being totally black.

saving with gimp... using "luminance" (hope it is it's name...my gimp is in italian) advanced mip option would help a lot too removing green and purple small points.

[Millenia]

You can save as ARGB 8.8.8.8 uncompressed format - it will take more space, but you won't lose any texture quality.

[evenstargw]

You can save as ARGB 8.8.8.8 uncompressed format - it will take more space, but you won't lose any texture quality.

 

Yes, well I have too many of those already. Some people will happily use 5 or more 10-20MB textures on an armor. That's fine if it is only worn by the player. Since I like to dress up my companions (I have quite a few) as well, this leaves very little room for all the other visual upgrades (QTP3, RAEVWD, etc). Going through too much video memory seems to make it crash very often, so I'm trying to keep a good balance between eye candy and performance.

[JDFan]

You can save as ARGB 8.8.8.8 uncompressed format - it will take more space, but you won't lose any texture quality.

 

Yes, well I have too many of those already. Some people will happily use 5 or more 10-20MB textures on an armor. That's fine if it is only worn by the player. Since I like to dress up my companions (I have quite a few) as well, this leaves very little room for all the other visual upgrades (QTP3, RAEVWD, etc). Going through too much video memory seems to make it crash very often, so I'm trying to keep a good balance between eye candy and performance.

 

If you drop down one step in texture size to save uncompressed you use the same amount of texture memory footprint and can at times get better results (esp. on black textures) -- since dxt compression is a 4:1 compression and a step down in texture size from for instance 1024x1024 to 512x512 is also a 4:1 drop in size. So ARGB 8.8.8.8 is sometimes a good alternative choice if you can also drop the overall filesize of the texture -- since it avoids the compression artifacts while keeping the same overall memory footprint.

[ziitch]

It's also good practice to combine UVs together in that case - Before making the texture, try to combine some of your objects together, and if they are meant to be mirrored, don't get rid of that Mirror modifier yet until you're all finished with UVs and finished rigging. You don't even have to separate them after unwrapping the UVs though - The NIF exporter will do this for you as long as each part that was originally a separate object has a different material assigned to them, and if they are the same as some other material you can set them to be merged. You can also get rid of normal-based seams this way too!