Atomic Systems

Hey guys so I decided to upgrade to max 2014 since RW has support for it and this is what I get when I export:
I applied trainbumpspecenvmask.fx shader to the body with all the parameters I had in max 2011. the only thing that works right now is the stupid stencil shadow and its texture and 3 of the 4 auto number decals and its shaders. clearly something wrong with the 2 placeholder. what parameter needs to be set for the .dds file when im saving it:
I had to convert all my .ace files over to .dds because max 2014 cant read .ace files. it looks normal in max but it looks like this in the editor.




Thanks

With new plugins you can't import ACE textures, they don't support.

You have to save DDS textures as follow:
X.8.8.8 XRGb for textures without alpha channel and 8.8.8.8 ARGB for textures with alpha channel.

thank you!

I don't know what's the point of the DDS files now. TgPcDx textures are DDS textures, just encoded with serz(and can be easily decoded. So now DDS is became the new intermediate format instead of ACE. Why don't the game use dds directly?

JACKONEILL wrote:With new plugins you can't import ACE textures, they don't support.

You have to save DDS textures as follow:
X.8.8.8 XRGb for textures without alpha channel and 8.8.8.8 ARGB for textures with alpha channel.

Do you know of a good tool to do this in some automated fashion? I always work in TIF because my source textures have dozens of layers in them. It's a total PAIN to use the Nvidia or ATI plugins in photoshop because you need to specifically export, then pick the format then save, then close and re-open the source TIF each time. What I used to do was save the TIFs and have a batch command line tool that called rwacetool or something similar.

The closest I've come up with is the ATI Compressonator tool which does have a command line and appears able to auto-detect the difference between images with and without an alpha channel.

This is what I've tried:
thecompressonator.exe -convert -mipmaps source.tif destination.dds

It seems to work but I'm not entirely sure if it is outputting in the right format.
If I use the Nvidia command line tool, it defaults to saving everything with alpha channels, which doesn't work in batch mode because there's no way to pre-parse the TIF images beforehand to tell the tool which do and don't have alpha channels.

My best guess is that generally speaking, DXT1 format is good for most textures - normal maps, diffuse maps etc, and DXT3 format is good for maps with alpha channels in.

Comments appreciated ...

By the TGPCDX exporter only uncompressed ARGB is supported. RGB is supported too, just it's broken. ACE is still the best choice.
And ACE textures ARE supported just not by the max plugin.

I use .tga files in 3DC and .ace versions of those files to export to TS2014.

I also use GIMP for graphics which cannot save in .ace format (a converter is required) but can save in .dds format if required.

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