I'm trying to retexture some recon armor. I've opened up the stock texture up in the Gimp via a dds plugin, but only the alpha channel seems to show up, there's no RGB just a checkerboard with some silhouettes. Anybody have any experience with this? I'm certain its the diffuse map.

Did you by chance open the file with the _n.dds extension on the end? It sounds to me like your trying to edit the Normal map for the armor instead of the base texture.

All textures that end in _n.dds are normal maps.

All textures that end in _g.dds are glow maps.

All textures that end in _e.dds are environment maps.

When starting out the only one you want to focus on editing is the normal texture, which doesn't have any of the above file-name fragments.

Miax

Don't get confused between the "normal texture" as in regular one and the "normal map" as in bump map... just throwing that in there... so it's a plug in that lets you open DDS files? If all else fails you could download DDS Converter 2.1 and just edit them as bitmaps then convert back to DDS.

Yeah, the recon helmet is textures\armor\headgear\BoSUnderArmorHelmet.dds
...and the recon armor is textures\armor\bosunderarmor\OutfitM.dds

As long as those are the file names it should work... but normal maps aren't usually alpha are they? I thought they were just pink and blue... maybe it's to do with the plugin?

Hi Imp,

Some of the textures (diffuse maps) in vanilla Fallout have a lot of alpha and when you open them in GIMP it is almost impossible to see anything. It has happened to me, too. You can try eliminating the alpha layer or reducing the amount of transparency (using the curves editor, for example) and see if that helps you.

If that doesn't help, try this: open the dds file with the compressonator (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11852) and save it as DTX1 (no alpha) and after that, open the saved file with GIMP.

Hope this helps

I'm 100% sure its the diffuse map (normal maps are usually sort of a pink color, plus I've cheated and opened it up in a different program.) It only has 4 channels - red, green, blue, and a single alpha. Disabling that alpha channel makes the image go away completely, leaving only the checkerboard that usually indicates transparency. Deleting the alpha channel made the checkerboard go away at least, but the colors were a bit washed out. Anyway, I'll probably just use something else. Thanks though.

This may seem silly, but in gimp there are two check boxes next to the entries Main Surface, Mipmap 1, etc (on the layers tab). If you mouse over one of them you can see the two boxes, make sure you click the left one so it has a little eye icon on it, then you can see the texture.

It must be something unique to the image, possibly the DTX compression like Ashara was suggesting - I tried opening up a couple of other diffuse maps (some armor from Kikai's Equipment) and one showed up fine, the other had a few areas of checkerboarding overlayed. It probably isn't a Gimp setting at least.

Imp, try what I said about opening it first with the compressonator and saving it as dds again. I've tested it and works for me

Hey, cool, gave it a try and that worked. Is there any problem with using DXT1 compression though? I've heard DXT5 is what most people use (I tried saving as both a DXT5 and DXT1, and only the DXT1 version opened up right).

I am not the expert here, but I believe that if your texture does not include alpha, then DXT1 is fine.

Glad it worked, Imp

It is as pkleiss said, if your texture has no transparency, DTX1 works fine. If your texture has transparency, then use DTX3 or DTX5.