DX11 texture converter

Nice, DX11 !

 

And how's KSH's repainting going on? Almost done?

 

Does this mean we have to redo all our current mods textures or they will not work!?

 

Awesome! Time to fix some textures ;D

 

i'd like to know this too, i have hundreds of textures to redo

 

Hi, for dx9 all your models will work just fine like before.If you want your model to work in DX11 you need to provide new textures (just add them to xml file used during conversion, together with dx9 textures). Dx9 and Dx11 will be selectable by users, we wont force dx11.

 

Will players that uses dx9 be able to use models that have the dx11 texture definitions? and if so, how does it work?

 

Well, this is certainly one way to filter out the dead mods. I suggest on the workshop having a tick mark to filter between dx9 and dx11.

 

You know what this means, expect DX11 next week! Here's hoping!

 

Wait, wait, so mods with unconverted textures will stop work at dx11? That sucks mighty! There must be backward comparability! (And no, "just switch back to outdated render" isn't a solution)

 

Their is backwards compatibility

 

I just said in my post that "if you want your old mods then don't switch to dx11" is not a solution(

If matter is in internal byte structure of dds files, then nothing can be done, I guess, but in any other case please make old _de and _ns files work! Let it be crappy, let it look horrible, but let it work, please! I doubt that even 50% of workshop mods will be updated!

 

Personally, I have so many things I will have to update it will take me weeks to do it. I doubt I will even have time to convert everything. I agree with @darth_biomech Please let old textures work, even if it will look bad.

 

I agree, if the model doesn't have DX11 textures, add the missing texture as blank textures internally so it doesn't look purple.

 

Can't the shaders that render the old textures be made available under DX11 as a fallback if there are no PBR textures? Like Darth Biomech I expect this to be pretty
disruptive to using mods. It will also produce a fair amount of "This mod no longer works, please fix it."

On another note the ME texture guide currently says (emphasis is mine):

I guess the "not specified" relates to the B channel only (I think G was unspecified a few weeks back and now has emissivity assigned to it).

Also, am I right to assume that SpecularPower and SpecularIntensity are no longer used with Physically Based Rendering?

And... oh crap, I need to think about how to support this with my Blender addon

 

Ok, I tried the converter. It's not just meant to create .dds textures from .tga, .tif, .jpg or .png images it's also able to convert de|me/ns textures into cm/ng/add textures.

• The albedo map is nearly identical to the diffuse map but seems to receive some image processing
• The metalness channel seems to be always black (which is why the _cm.dds looks like it's empty)
  
• The normal map is copied verbatim. EDIT: Is this the right thing to do? The ME texture guide specifically mentions: "DX11 uses a different green channel than DX9", i.e. OpenGL normal maps.
  
• The glossiness channel is calculated from the specularity channel but looks much brighter. I guess this is due to different value scaling used in the PBR shaders. SpecularIntensity and SpecularPower seem not to be taken into consideration because I had no .xml files in my conversion source folder.
• The color mask channel is calculated from the 115-140 value range of the alpha channel of me textures.
  
• It seems the emissivity channel is not converted, yet. I get no green color when I convert me/de textures that have some black in their alpha channel.
  
• The ambient occlusion channel is fully red, i.e. no additional AO.

I had to set COMPRESS = 'Dx9' in dx9to11.py. Otherwise I was not able to open the resulting .dds files in Gimp.

Sadly, TextureBuilder.exe has no command-line usage information at all.

There's also a Pyhton script update_xmls.py that looks like it can add cm/ng/add entries to parameter.xml files for MwmBuilder. The textures already in the .xml file need to follow the me/de/ns naming scheme for that to work.

 

I'm wondering if converting all the textures offline is the best approach to this? We are more than doubling the size of our mods without any immediate visual gain.

Im also wondering if it would be easy to provide us with a converter that does the opposite: converting from PBR/DX11 textures to DX9 textures. I have to admit I'm not looking forward to create good looking PBR textures and then to repeat that work to produce less good looking DX9 textures.

EDIT: And to rephrase Darth Biomechs question: What will happen if a mod is loaded that has blocks where textures for the current renderer are undefined?

 

I have ran the xml converter multiple times, for me it's only converting the first set of material. Anyone else get this or is it intended? Say you have 6 materials in your xml, and it only converts the first, that has to be wrong, correct?

 

Funny, you are right. There's no loop in the script that could handle more than one material.

 

I assume not all textures need converted. Icons and UI elements will stay dx9?

 

Hm, the ME texture guide doesn't have to say anything about transparent/glass textures.
Do those work like before? I guess not because they used the DX9 textures.
Is this were the AlphaMask texture comes into play? From the description "cut-off alpha" I guess not.

 

I have two additional questions:

• What format is the _alphamask.dds texture in? Just one greyscale-channel? If it is, which .dds compression format are we supposed to use for this? If it isn't, which channel is the alphamask supposed to be in?
  
• Are the <Parameter name="DiffuseColorX|Y|Z"> still used with DX11 textures? (I already asked about SpecularIntensity and SpecularPower)

 

Are the Textures for DX11 the same in ME and SE now? I ran the conversion on all of my Asteroid materials and tried to load one into ME for grins, but it was black like it was missing. I suppose custom voxels may not be implemented in ME yet and that's why they are black?

Also I'm assuming we need to rebuild all models with the new textures. Is that correct?
I'm really not looking forward to that since MWMbuilder only wants to cooperate 30% of the time.

 

Got my models updated following the readme . . . except they appear to be about 1/100th of their normal size now. . . .

Edit: Tried turning rescale to true, no change, change the scale number to 1.00 instead of 0.01 no change. Will try doing both a the same time next.... but that will have to be later, have to do something now. Very odd seeing my workdesk be the size of ones pinky finger.

 

I noticed that Maya rescales models down further and further each time you open and re-export from the Same FBX chain. Some of mine need 1000x scaling now to be normal size. I wish they would have given us mwmbuilder as source so we could get it working properly...

 

Maybe it's Maya's exporter problem, and not MVMbuilder's?

 

-Albedo is converted to srgb. We have no good way -to generate metalness so it stays black for generated textures.
-Normalmap conversion looks like a bug, we will try to fix that asap.
-Glossiness is transformed so it matches better brdf we use in dx11 renderer.
-Emissive should generate correctly, it converted fine textures we use for dx9.
-We don't bake ao for textures automaticaly (that is why it stays white).
-Alphamask use grey channel for alpha cutting. Compression is ignored for that texture.

Compression 'Dx11' uses bc7 format. Sadly many tools don't work well with that.

 

Two questions please
a) does it neccessary to change and\or define textures in the xml and recompile the models? Or it would be enough to just put dx11 textures in the same folder with the same name? if recompiling is neccessary, would it be enough to instead this

Code:

    <Parameter Name="DiffuseTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_de.dds</Parameter>
    <Parameter Name="NormalTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_ns.dds</Parameter>
    <Parameter Name="ColorMetalTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_cm.dds</Parameter>
    <Parameter Name="NormalGlossTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_ng.dds</Parameter>
    <Parameter Name="AddMapsTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_add.dds</Parameter>

leave only that

Code:

    <Parameter Name="DiffuseTexture">Textures\Models\Cubes\large_thrust_large_de.dds</Parameter>
    <Parameter Name="NormalTexture" />
    <Parameter Name="ColorMetalTexture" />
    <Parameter Name="NormalGlossTexture" />
    <Parameter Name="AddMapsTexture" />

like it was possibe to do with dx9 texture paths?
B) it is neccessary to create them through texture converter? Or just saving directly from Photoshop into appropriate texture suffix is acceptable manual way of doing this too? Or it won't work? Why? I noticed that I cannot open many of vanila dx11 textures.

 

Actually I think it's the FBX Importer in Maya, that resets the scale or it could just be a general bug in 2015 that doesn't preserve user settings properly.
My issues with mwmbuilder were a separate thought even though it didn't come out that way.(first day back to work after a 3day weekend, and its morning.)