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Texture Optimization For Night Appearance

Gianni

Gianni

Messages
453
Country
austria
Hi!

I am a little bit in dispair because of the texture quality in my current project. Maybe somebody has a idea how to encrease the look in FS9:

Usually I am painting the textures with Photoshop CS2 (partly using real photos at least as a template). For the night textures I reduce brightness and contrast adding light flares where needed. The problem is that after compiling the night-textures (with Imagetool) in FS9 these textures are very often crowded with ugly coloured patches - even if I had reduced the tonal values to the minimum. It seems to me that some gray values are turned into colour values during the compilation. What surprises me is that the described result does not follow a clear pattern - sometimes it works, sometimes not.

I wonder whether I am doing something wrong during the paint process or if something is happening during the compilation process.

Any ideas?
 
Hard to say what is going on from what you posted.

Based on what you've said, it sounds to me like ImageTool or Photoshop CS2 is doing something to your textures.

I assume in Photoshop you have an xxxxxx.psd file; then you should create a copy of this psd file called xxxxxxx_lm.psd. On this _lm psd you should create your night textures.

Then...flatten image...save As .bmp...load your .bmp in ImageTool, convert to image format of your choice (I use DXT5 since I design for FSX)...add MipMaps...save and exit.

All done.

This produces good night light map textures for me. I do not EVER resize the image, or resample the image in any way.

From what you described (blotches of color) it sounds as though you are resampling the textures in some way. Perhaps Photoshop CS2 is doing something to them?
 
Perhaps add a layer of say 90% opacity black to darken the image, rather than afjusting the contrast. You can add lighting effects on top of this using the Photoshop lighting blending options.

Have you tried using DXTBmp to see if you get the same problems?
 
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