What's your intermediate texture format

rollin

Heyho,

what are you using for saving textures uncompressed before moving to dds or any custom format? What is the best in comparison to file size, features and standardisation

tif
tga
png
other (100% jpg...)
custom


all time favorite is tga, with 16 bit you are forced to use tif (or a similar file format) and unity "promotes" png which has a really small file size compared to the others

Ashaman73

I prefer png in all my pipelines, it provides 16bits per channel, meta information (srgb, gamma etc), lossless compression, web-browser support and wide tool support.

Farfarer

Yeah, I use 16bit PNG. Lighter weight than most other stuff and is widely supported, while giving lossless 8 or 16bit with transparency or alpha. Also you generally get thumbnails from it in everything, which is handy.

Deadly Nightshade

I like PNG overall but I don´t like the extra steps you have to take in order to convert transparency into an alpha channel.

thomasp

for everything that lives on my SSD and doesn't need to store layers: TGA, plain and simple and compatible.

TIF isn't all that compatible in my experience and saving with compression takes quite a while with larger textures. PSD grows large very quickly and has compatibility issues as well.

PNG is just an export format in my world. too cumbersome to work with alpha channels in PS.

marks

We're using OpenEXR on the project I'm currently on. Pretty amazing format but support for it in many DCC apps can be kinda flaky. We use it to store everything from regular textures through to color grading LUTs, HDR cubemaps ... everything stored in the same format in float.

Farfarer

Deadly Nightshade wrote: »

I like PNG overall but I don´t like the extra steps you have to take in order to convert transparency into an alpha channel.

I find with the SuperPNG plugin it's pretty easy. You can set the default to be "Alpha appears as a separate channel" and then everything will be used as an alpha channel rather than transparency.

Bal

thomasp, the problem with TGA is that you can't have 16bit per channel, which is becoming more relevant nowadays.

PNG seems like a good solution overall but I don't think it handles mipmaps? (Useful sometimes when you want to edit them for whatever reason.) OpenEXR does it all I think, but yeah it's pretty annoying for compatibility.

We still use uncompressed 8.8.8.8 or + DDS, which the engine re-compresses afterwards, but since there's no more support for the Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop, it doesn't seem wise to continue using DDS as an intermediate format.

WarrenM

Generally TGA but the 16-bit thing has me interested lately...

thomasp

ok, so where would the 16 bits per channel come in these days? are we talking displacement maps or other stuff straight out of a bake here? because i'm sure we can make a format exception for those.

supposedly i am working on current gen stuff on unreal engine but haven't come across these so far (on characters).

EXR sounds like an enviable solution - for your own inhouse tech.

rollin

I'm using exr a lot lately for displacement maps but didn't tried to use it as the main file format. Even though it works really good and supports the true 32bit floating point range without getting instantly incredibly big.


Farfarer: thx for the SuperPNG hint!! really cool
definitely worth to post the link http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/

Eric Chadwick

You'll get better results using 16bpc (or higher) for baking normal maps, then converting down to 8bpc after any processing. For example using Handplane or blending normal maps.

Check out Earthquake's excellent thread Of Bit Depths, Banding and Normal Maps.