VTFs becoming green when compiled

[blackmantis357]

I'm having a strange issue here; although it's likely to be some sort of image format problem.

I save an image that contains greyscale colours, (either in its entirety, or certain areas of the image) as a 32 bit TGA, run it through vtex but the white areas of my new vtf always show up green.



What can I do to avoid this?

[kraid]

Maybe this could be caused by the compression.

[blackmantis357]

Maybe this could be caused by the compression.

That may be, but what I'd like to know is how to fix it? Official VALVe textures do not suffer from the same issue.

[Jangalomph]

Dont run it through VTEX, run it through VTFedit.

[blackmantis357]

Dont run it through VTEX, run it through VTFedit.

VTFedit ruins the texture alignment on vtfs so I can't use it. It also seems to create bad mipmaps and causes the same problem; it causes all parts of the texture to turn green slightly.

[kraid]

I never saw any texture missalignment on textures i compiled with VTFedit.
Maybe you're using wrong settings.

[Dives]

Place a text file with the same name as your TGA in the same folder. Put "nocompress 1" (without quotes) in the text file.
Vtex will process your texture and tell you that it's not compressing it.

[blackmantis357]

I never saw any texture missalignment on textures i compiled with VTFedit.
Maybe you're using wrong settings.

I'm using the default settings. It's been like this on every single system I've owned, on every installation since 2006.

Place a text file with the same name as your TGA in the same folder. Put "nocompress 1" (without quotes) in the text file.
Vtex will process your texture and tell you that it's not compressing it.

Still no luck unfortunately, have tried dragging both my TXT files and my TGA files over vtex but they still show up green. Vtex also doesn't state anything about not compressing them.

input file: ../half-life 2/hl2/materialsrc/Tile/tilewall001d
output directory: ../half-life 2/hl2/materials/Tile
Hit a key to continue

The resulting file still also appears green, although I think it's vtex just not recognizing the nocompress 1 command.

Is there perhaps something wrong with my TGAs? I'm saving them with 32 bits/pixel (Compress RLE unchecked).

[srredfire]

You can try using the Photoshop plugin for it. I use that all the time and I've never noticed any kind of problems.

But maybe I just never looked!

[blackmantis357]

You can try using the Photoshop plugin for it. I use that all the time and I've never noticed any kind of problems.

But maybe I just never looked!

Sadly no luck with the photoshop plugin, same issue as vtfedit.

[Jangalomph]

Maybe its your monitor playing some black magic on you.

[ErikKiller]

They look OK on my laptop but greenish on my desktop monitor.

[blackmantis357]

Maybe its your monitor playing some black magic on you.

Nah it's not my monitor, that's why I put the picture up.

Sadly the vtfs are misaligned in the photoshop plugin as well. VTEX is the only one capable of producing stable textures, with the exception of turning white to green.

[Stormy]

It un-aligns the texture when you save it with a different program? That sounds all wrong. The only way that can happen is if the texture image is being moved when it saves, otherwise it's something to do with the UV co-ords being modified somehow. The GIMP VTF plugin allows for like thirty different compression settings. Try them all, I assume the ps plugin has similar options. Don't use VTFedit or VTEX, they were useful back when there were no plugins for image editing programs but now they just complicate a simple process.

[Gambini]

Your texture turns greenish because the DTX compression method, it´s always been like that. If you can´t live with it save your textures in BGR888 but beware they´re gonna eat much more memory.

Just for your info these are the most common vmf formats:

DTX1: Compressed texture. Turns to be greenish as you described, mostly with grayscales. Also it may expose some artifacts specially with fine gradients.
DTX3: Same but with a 1bit (monochrome) alpha channel
DTX5: Same but with 8bits alpha
BGR888: Uncompressed texture format (may take up to 4-5 times the filesize of a DTX with the same resolution)
BGRA8888: Same than above but with an alpha channel.