Mipmaps and alpha

[wick73230]

Hello guys,

I am doing some texturing mods for ME2 and ME3 for quite a while now. So I decided to retexture ME1 a bit now. The problem is that some textures can be extracted from the tree and some are just transparent when they're extracted. This makes me unable to properly alter them. Another problem I encountered is when changing a texture with an altered version of mine. There comes an error message saying "Mission Failure - Mipmap error. Requires: 11. Currently:1". I never saw that when texturing the other two games. Maybe its because in ME1 I'm altering an armour? I'd be glad for any answers.

Regards

Wick73230

[giftfish]

This isn't a Texplorer problem for the most part, it's a texturing/mipmap question. Relocating thread.

1. You should read up on the wiki regarding textures in Mass Effect.

2. All non-GUI textures in all 3 games use mipmaps. If you've done textures for ME2/ME3 and they aren't GUI related, you should have built mipmaps into them. Both PS and GIMP do this automatically, as long as you tell it so when saving/exporting the file.

3. If the toolset tells you 11 mips are needed and your texture only has 1, it's b/c you forgot to generate the mips.

4. If textures are transparent, that suggests you probably use GIMP and are extracting DXT5 textures that have a very transparent alpha. GIMP does not handle these textures well. I've experienced this personally, as a GIMP user without access to PS.

[ottemis]

To expand on 4. Consider using KFreon's ImageEngine to extract all channels on a texture that otherwise opens transparently in GIMP. That way you preserve the alpha, you can edit the channels separately and you can feed them back into ImageEngine to reform the texture with proper alpha. That, or use Photoshop.

github.com/KFreon/CSharpImageLibrary

For extra information on channels, there is a tutorial on the wiki. It's still a wip, but should help quite a bit with that if you run into any issues. It also touches on issues editing textures with certain Image Editors, as you are experiencing now.

There might also be GIMP tutorials floating around on the web, but I use Photoshop personally so that's my best advice.