How To Fix Blurred Textures

TARPSBird

TARPSBird

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Staff member
Somebody - Obio maybe? - explained to me how to fix this on a previous occasion, maybe somebody can refresh my memory. J.R. Lucariny's P2V-7 comes with a decent USN paint job, but the textures are blurred when I select the aircraft in FS9. Black-background pic shows the plane in Aircraft Container Manager, other pic is the plane in FS9. I can't remember what I did last time with a Me-109 that had the same problem. Any suggestions will be most appreciated and I promise to file them away this time for future reference. :salute:
 
Run the textures through DXTbmp and remove the mips. That's what is causing the blurred texture.:salute:
 
Ed, I'm starting to remember the original solution that was given me was just what you suggested. That said, I feel I can ask this here without being laughed at: Exactly what are mips?
 
Basically mips are lower resolution copies of the original texture stored as additional image
layers. Used by the graphics card to reduce processor load. Some graphics cards work well with them, and some don't.

Ttfn

Pete
 
convimx, also by Martin Wright, might speed up the process, as you can select several files and convert them to the format needed in one go, preserving alpha channel information.

MIPs, as Pete has just said (edit), are size-reduced versions of the original image, e.g. for a 1024 texture there will be 512, 256, 128, 64, 32 versions (and possibly more), all integrated in the main texture file. These will usually be accessed by FS when the aircraft is seen from afar, but they can have the side effect that you show in your pic.
 
Thank you everybody for the replies. I took falcon409's advice and saved the external textures in DXTBmp without the mips and that fixed the problem. I will now put this info into a text file so if I have the problem again I'll know what to do. :salute:
 
Since that doesn't work 100% on all aircraft for whatever reasons, another "fix" is to zoom all the way in on the aircraft in spot then zoom back out. Should hold for as long as you fly that aircraft in that session.
 
mjahn said:
convimx, also by Martin Wright, might speed up the process, as you can select several files and convert them to the format needed in one go, preserving alpha channel information.
Click to expand...
Good info, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the HU!! :salute:
 
For a long while I had similar problems until I discovered that my diplay settings (harware: mip mapping quality, hardware rendered lights and global max texture size, sliders weren't where I should have them - all the way right.
 
Microsoft's Imagetool (comes with several of the SDK's) works with batch files. I've attached a zip here with a few choice format options. The "safe" notation in each means that the batch won't dig recursively into sub-folders, which can be dangerous. I also included the original MS executable and a screen cap of what happens when you use -? command in a batch or command line.
 
Hi. Yes, good idea running textures through Imagetool. I just ran a brief test on Tom's batch files, and they do the work with a minimum of fuss. Note, however, that Imagetool doesn't equal Imagetool. The version Tom attaches is

imagetool.exe 188,416 23.01.2006 23:48

which I believe dates back to the 2004 SDK. As has been noted elsewhere, the newer version that comes the FSX SDK's produces better quality compression formats (such as the dxt's). The version I have is

ImageTool.exe 226,880 10.12.2007 21:38

and is from the SP2 FSX SDK. I am attaching it for your own testing - it runs Tom's batch files just fine.

Regarding the batch code itself, for example,

imagetool -batch -dxt3 -nomip -e bmp *.bmp

If I read the help file correctly the -e bmp seems to be redundant as it is the default. I would also drop the word "safe" from the file names because you need the explicit switch "-r" in them to do subdirs as well and provided that's what you want it would also be "safe". Perhaps use "localdir" instead? What arguably is not so safe is the source file search pattern *.bmp because in your source folder you might have different bmp formats, say 32 (often used for props and fuselages), dxt3 (wings) and dxt1 (VC or alphaless stuff)), and levelling them out to one type of bmp might be a tad incautious or inefficient. To be entirely certain of what you have and what you are doing better analyse the source files first (drop them on an Imagetool icon), and then address them individually in the batches. Which naturally complicates the process and makes giving the batch file a telling name rather difficult....

Sorry, just random thoughts. Definitely no nitpicking intended on what is clearly a very useful reply, apologies if this should come across as such.
 
mjahn said:
. . . . . .because in your source folder you might have different bmp formats, say 32 (often used for props and fuselages), dxt3 (wings) and dxt1 (VC or alphaless stuff)). . . . . . .
Click to expand...
I've been doing aircraft liveries for years, ever since I first got FS9. . .whenever that was first released and I don't believe I have ever seen anyone, including any of the folks I consider to be the extremely talented group of artists, differentiate the various conversion types as you have here. I have always assumed (because no one ever said any different) that within any single livery, all textures were done using the same conversion, be it DXT3 w/alpha, 32bit/888 and so on. Why would you use a different conversion for different parts of the airplane?
 
falcon409 said:
I've been doing aircraft liveries for years, ever since I first got FS9. . .whenever that was first released and I don't believe I have ever seen anyone, including any of the folks I consider to be the extremely talented group of artists, differentiate the various conversion types as you have here. I have always assumed (because no one ever said any different) that within any single livery, all textures were done using the same conversion, be it DXT3 w/alpha, 32bit/888 and so on. Why would you use a different conversion for different parts of the airplane?
Click to expand...

There are one or two developers that do this. Main reason would be to reduce processor load,
32 bit 8-888 vs dxt, when a highly complex part is rendered. One of the 3d guru forums has an interesting write up
on the merits of dxt vs 32 bit 8-888

There are many parts which never get changed by a repaint.

Ttfn
Pete
 
Many of the old Posky jets had a mixed bag of formats, from uncompressed 32-bit main fuse and wings files, to dxt1's for some of the smaller bits. I always thought it was better to have all of them the same so that the processor only has to run one type of decompression method, but I could be wrong about that.

And thanks for the updated Imagetool - I never d/l'd any of the dark side's SDK's, so I didn't know there was a newer version.

Edit: When I try to run the new Imagetool, I get a notice that I'm missing "d3dx9_34.dll" and the app won't launch. I'm trying to find a copy online, but so far I'm only finding exe's that will supposedly install it - but I'm not willing to risk what they might actually install.
 
Tom Clayton said:
Many of the old Posky jets had a mixed bag of formats, from uncompressed 32-bit main fuse and wings files, to dxt1's for some of the smaller bits. I always thought it was better to have all of them the same so that the processor only has to run one type of decompression method, but I could be wrong about that.

And thanks for the updated Imagetool - I never d/l'd any of the dark side's SDK's, so I didn't know there was a newer version.
Click to expand...

That's who I was thinking of, and their offshoot HJG, or was it other way around...

Ttfn

Pete
 
I get a notice that I'm missing "d3dx9_34.dll" and the app won't launch. I'm trying to find a copy online, but so far I'm only finding exe's that will supposedly install it - but I'm not willing to risk what they might actually install.
Click to expand...

If you trust me ... copy to c:\Windows\System32\l
 
Motormouse said:
That's who I was thinking of, and their offshoot HJG, or was it other way around...

Ttfn

Pete
Click to expand...

Historic Jetliners Group is a different outfit. After Posky broke up, Hiroshi started the Sky Spirit groups on Facebook, and Andrew changed over to the new Free Sky Project. Their forum is still open, but there's not much happening.

mjahn said:
If you trust me ... copy to c:\Windows\System32\l
Click to expand...

Close... I tried it there, but no dice. After doing a little research, I found that on a 64-bit W7 machine, 64-bit dll's go in the system32 folder, but 32-bit dll's go in the sysWOW64 folder. Backwards, I know, but it's working now.
 
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