Questions about Standalone Texture Tools and Texture Tools for Photoshop

Gaming and Visualization Technologies APIs DirectX, DXR, DirectCompute
1

Not sure which category to pick for these questions, as none of the choices seemed appropriate or specific enough for the Texture Tools.
The older Plugin for Photoshop CS to export DDS files had many more options for filtering Mip Maps, such as fading to Black or White down the Mip Chain. It also allowed Photoshop the expand the Mip Chain, allow artists to change the contents of the Mip Chain and then re-save the changes back into the DDS file.

From what i can tell the newer Texture Tools lack both capabilities. The Mip Map options are very basic compared to what was previously offered, and opening a DDS with Mips into Photoshop now puts each Mip into its own Layer, which does not allow for modifications to be saved back into the DDS file.

2

Hi rkovach! I’m the lead developer of the new Texture Tools Exporter.

Could you tell me a bit about your use case for mip fading? I’m taking a look at non-physically-based mipmap modification, and I figure if this is something I could put behind a single checkbox instead of requiring setting a slider per mip, that would probably be helpful. For the new version, I figured mip fading seemed like a thing that developers and artists might find it useful to implement in a shader (since that allows many textures to be changed at once instead of having to go through and re-export each texture, and also allows finer control over how textures fade).

Thanks!

3

Yes, the older NVidia DDS Exporter offered a lot of options for modifying the Mip Chain. One of the options was to fade the Mip Chain to a specific color instead of letting the values be the result of down sampling.

One use case is to fade Roughness value to 1, so the last Mip doesn’t produce strong reflections when a triangle becomes edge-on with the camera.

Another use case is to fade an Alpha Channel to Zero prematurely to get edge-on triangles to fade away.

4

Also, the older DDS Plugin allowed you to open, view, and save Mip Maps. The newer plugin will open Mip Maps and display each Mip in a separate Layer, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to modify the Mips and then save the results back into the DDS.
The old plugin would display the Mip Chain in an extended Canvas like so:

image
image1087Ă—575 257 KB

You can freely edit the Mips and then save the results back to the DDS.

5

Hi. I am agree, that new plugin lack some crucial functionality . In our company there is a workflow to sharpen mip maps, but leaving original image untouched. New plugin version does not allow separate mipmap sharpening. It would be cool to create some option to add effects only for the mips, without damaging original image. I would like to ask you to add this feature asap, since adobe forcefully deleted all our old Photoshop versions and we are now forced to use new toolset)

6

Hi user27546! I forgot to update this thread when we released it, but we implemented rkovach’s request in the newest version of the Texture Tools Exporter. If you load a DDS or KTX file with “Load Mipmaps” checked:

image

mipmaps will now load in with the layout described above:

image
image1387Ă—702 93.3 KB

You can then modify them in Photoshop. To save the new custom mipmaps out, you’ll want to

  • check “Extract Mipmaps from Atlas” (this will tell the tool to split up the image into separate regions)
  • choose the number of mipmaps that are there (this is because the exact number is ambiguous with rectangular mips)
  • uncheck “Regenerate Mipmaps” (otherwise the tool will automatically create new mips).

image
image1183Ă—761 125 KB

You can then scrub through the mips using the Mip slider to verify that everything works.

There are a couple of workflow improvements I’m hoping to add here in the future as well.

Thanks!

7

Thanks!

8

Hello, I’m running into the same issue despite using the latest version. All mips are still loaded as layers. Using PS2019.
Thanks in advance and have a nice day!

EDIT: I made sure to uninstall the previous version of NVTT and reinstalled it - works at intended.

If you run into the same issue:

  • Use something like GeekUninstaller to completely uninstall NVTT
  • Make sure your Plug-Ins folder doesn’t have anything related to NVTT
  • Download the latest version of NVTT, install it. You’re done.

Thanks @nbickford for adding back that feature!

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