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Old 16th March 2017, 05:46 AM   #1
lonewulf
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Default Not possible to use DDS textures?

Hi fellows,

Unfortunately I'm unable to do a search for "DDS textures" as obviously the keyword "DDS" is too short and so I'm confronted with hundreds of entries regarding "textures" - which makes it virtually impossible to find anything pertinent within reasonable time. So I have decided to set up this question, although I presume that it has been asked already a few times.

I'm brand new to AC3D and just bought the newest release 8.0.80. My idea was to redo a few sceneries for X-Plane that I have done in the past with other 3D modeling software. I wanted to use the same DDS texture sheets that I used at times but just learned that it seems not possible to use DDS textures (with and without Alpha channel) in AC3D. There is no error message when loading but they simply do not show up.

What am I missing? Are there other easy-to-use tools to create Alpha-channel textures (so far I used DXTBMP)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oskar
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Old 17th March 2017, 12:13 AM   #2
captainpeter
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

AC3D supports .dds textures.
Are you using MacOS or Windows? Have you tried using lower-case characters for the file extension?

Remember that DDS is a distribution file format and often uses data-reduction to achieve small file sizes. I would recommend to use PNG format for texturing and editing in AC3D and only replace with DDS right before you export to X-Plane.

There's a tool to create x-plane optimized DDS files available here.

cheers
peter



Quote:
Originally Posted by lonewulf View Post
Hi fellows,

Unfortunately I'm unable to do a search for "DDS textures" as obviously the keyword "DDS" is too short and so I'm confronted with hundreds of entries regarding "textures" - which makes it virtually impossible to find anything pertinent within reasonable time. So I have decided to set up this question, although I presume that it has been asked already a few times.

I'm brand new to AC3D and just bought the newest release 8.0.80. My idea was to redo a few sceneries for X-Plane that I have done in the past with other 3D modeling software. I wanted to use the same DDS texture sheets that I used at times but just learned that it seems not possible to use DDS textures (with and without Alpha channel) in AC3D. There is no error message when loading but they simply do not show up.

What am I missing? Are there other easy-to-use tools to create Alpha-channel textures (so far I used DXTBMP)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oskar
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Old 17th March 2017, 05:17 AM   #3
lonewulf
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

Quote:
Originally Posted by captainpeter View Post
AC3D supports .dds textures.
Are you using MacOS or Windows? Have you tried using lower-case characters for the file extension?

Remember that DDS is a distribution file format and often uses data-reduction to achieve small file sizes. I would recommend to use PNG format for texturing and editing in AC3D and only replace with DDS right before you export to X-Plane.

There's a tool to create x-plane optimized DDS files available here.
Thank you, Peter, for your immediate reply. I'm working on Win10. In the meantime I have done some texturing trials with my "old" textures converted to *.png format and it seems that this works. The "*.dds" extensions of my original files do in fact use lower-case for that. Nevertheless I'll give it a try with replacing the textures just before exporting.

Oskar
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Old 17th March 2017, 02:19 PM   #4
lonewulf
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

Just for the sake of completeness: after a few more trials I found that although DXT1 textures can be used (after applying textures in PNG format and then replacing by DDS - DXT1), they definitely do not show on the 2D/3D views in AC3D. The Xplane tool DDSTool.exe converts the PNG textures into DXT5 format, which are properly shown in AC3D.

Unfortunately DXT5 textures are - depending on their graphical content - much larger than DXT1, which is not very practical for obvious reasons.

As a suggestion to the devs: It would therefore be great if AC3D could also show textures in DXT1 format
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Old 17th March 2017, 09:11 PM   #5
captainpeter
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

The X-Plane DDSTool.exe will look at the source file and use the proper DDS format (DXT1, DXT3 or DXT5).

A assume you had a source texture with Alpha Channel.
If your alpha had more than a few shades of grey DXT5 is the proper format.

peter

Quote:
Originally Posted by lonewulf View Post
Just for the sake of completeness: after a few more trials I found that although DXT1 textures can be used (after applying textures in PNG format and then replacing by DDS - DXT1), they definitely do not show on the 2D/3D views in AC3D. The Xplane tool DDSTool.exe converts the PNG textures into DXT5 format, which are properly shown in AC3D.

Unfortunately DXT5 textures are - depending on their graphical content - much larger than DXT1, which is not very practical for obvious reasons.

As a suggestion to the devs: It would therefore be great if AC3D could also show textures in DXT1 format
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Old 18th March 2017, 05:32 AM   #6
lonewulf
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

Quote:
Originally Posted by captainpeter View Post
The X-Plane DDSTool.exe will look at the source file and use the proper DDS format (DXT1, DXT3 or DXT5).

A assume you had a source texture with Alpha Channel.
If your alpha had more than a few shades of grey DXT5 is the proper format.

peter
Hi Peter,

Sorry, that's going too far into details for me I'm just trying to be a common user of some various graphical formats for texturing. What I'm seeing so far is that I can get various DDS formats (DXT1 - 5) with various size. Nevertheless in the final product they are working on the textured model, although (DXT1) not showing in AC3D at the texturing stage.

I will give it a try with the various formats at a later stage. At present I use DXTBMP to apply an Alpha channel if desired. I must nevertheless admit that so far I haven't taken too much care of the what's and whereabouts of the Alpha channel. It might well be that it was - although only needed for full transparency (RGB black 255) - made of a 8-bit grayscale. Funny still that although using the same Alpha channel the final texture size could vary in the magnitude of 2:1 (DXT5 : DXT1).

But, as mentioned at the beginning, I'm in no way an expert on graphical formats. My option is simply to use the smallest possible format to save loading time in the final application.

Thank you nevertheless for your explanations and help.

Oskar
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Old 23rd March 2017, 08:34 PM   #7
captainpeter
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Default Re: Not possible to use DDS textures?

To see the differences between PNG, DXT5, DXT3 and DXT1 compression I have textured 4 cubes with a simple texture containing an alpha layer. (attached)

Left is PNG, then DXT5, .....

PNG uses 8 bits (256 levels) per channel RGB & A.
DXT5 uses 8 bits for alpha as well but incorporates compression for the A channel.
DXT3 contains only 4 bit uncompressed alpha showing distinct steps in transparency.
DXT1 is 1 bit alpha. Only usable for sharp masks.

The file size differences in .DDS files comes primarily from MIP-maps which are included in DDS and not in PNG. Usually X-Plane will adjust the texture size based on your rendering settings. At max settings X-Plane uses textures at original size, with every step lower in rendering settings your actual texture size for display will be halved. The process of adjusting a few hundred textures to - say - 50% takes time. By including scaled down versions of the texture in the .DDS file (MIPmaps) you significantly increase X-Plane's texture load performance.
It doesn't matter how big the file size actually is, it is primarily a question of CPU time wasted with texture adjustments.

So, for transparent textures I always prefer DXT5 over DXT3/1. There are only a few situations where DXT3 makes sense. No matter how large those files may be. They will almost always load faster than PNG due to MIPmaps.

cheers
peter
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