How do you save BC7 DDS textures?

kodde · Mar 2016

Hey guys,

I'm curious how to go about saving a BC7 DDS in an artist friendly manner. The Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop does not seem to support this.

I know game engines might handle this for the user and only worry about importing your uncompressed source texture, but I'm curious how you go about doing this manually.

I've found some command line tools but no easy program with GUI so far.

Anyone have any experience with this or suggestions?
Thanks.

Millenia · Mar 2016

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-texture-compression-plugin-for-photoshop Intel Texture Works does the trick, I use it to save DX11 formats for Fallout 4.

kodde · Mar 2016

Hey thanks. I'll give it a try.

GlowingPotato · Mar 2016

Tip:
The only annoying thing, this Intel plugin wont open transparency as alpha channel.
So you have to reconstruct the channel using Layer>Layer Mask > From transparency

kodde · Mar 2016

Aha. That's good to know. Thanks.

kodde · Mar 2016

It also seems that when opening a BC7 I get spotches of semi-transparent areas?
I tried placing a layer below with black color. This seemed to produce correct results as far as I could tell. Are you guys getting this issue as well? I take it it is just something related to how they load the BC7 DDS in photoshop?

GlowingPotato · Mar 2016

Well. Alpha in BC7 is optional. Do you mind to post a sample for testing ?

kodde · Mar 2016

I chose the "texture type: color" not "texture type: color + alpha".

glowingpotato> Here's an example of a 1024x1024 RGB BC7 DDS saved with the Intel plugin.
http://kostas.se/files/bike_bc7_fine.dds

kodde · Mar 2016

And here's the semi transparent "splotches" i was referring to.

Image: http://kostas.se/files/bc7_splotches.jpg

GlowingPotato · Mar 2016

Indeed. very weird. If you choose no alpha, those spots should be black.
But there is no alpha channel. Its more like artifacts... but that pattern looks like transparency... but there is no alpha channel... I'am confused.

EDIT: Placing a layer below with ANY color works... more weird.

kodde · Mar 2016

Hehe me too.
But like I mentioned. Try creating a new layer, place it below and fill with black color. Looks correct to me. Still not sure what is going on though.

GlowingPotato · Mar 2016

kodde said:

Hehe me too.
But like I mentioned. Try creating a new layer, place it below and fill with black color. Looks correct to me. Still not sure what is going on though.

Not only black, paint it with lime green and the image looks correct, any color.

kodde · Mar 2016

What the hell...

kodde · Mar 2016

No actually it does matter. There's a difference depending on what color you put in that lower layer. A very small difference however.

kodde · Mar 2016

When comparing it to the original image on my end black seems to be a better fit than white.

GlowingPotato · Mar 2016

Definitely makes sense...But I have no idea what is going on with that "alpha". The image is 24bits, 8 bits per channel. There is no Alpa (or shouldn't in this case).

throttlekitty · Mar 2016

Is the image "Flat" in photoshop? There's a subtle change behind the scenes if the only layer is named Layer 0 or Background. Try Layer>Flatten Image.

It's beta software, so if that still gives you an issue, pass them a note on their tracker?

How do you save BC7 DDS textures?

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