...
The main thing might be what DDS options you want to use, primarily you want to use these as per the convert_dds_mtr batch and convert_dds_portrait files:
| File Type | DTX type | Other options | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diffuse | -DXT5A | Not all diffuse textures require the alpha channel (ie if no transparency) so can use DTX1 for those | |
| Normal | -DXN | -normalize -uniformMetrics | DXN appears to be "3DC" compression |
| Specular | -DXT5A | ||
| Metallicness | -DXT5A | -minvalue 5 | |
| Roughness | -DXT5A | -invertcolors | |
| Glossiness | -DXT5A | ||
| Height | -DXT5A | ||
| Illumination | -DXT1 | No transparency allowed on illumination | |
| Portrait | |||
| Portrait | -DXT1 | -deep -recreate -mipmode none | See notes on mipmaps below - by default portraits won't load mipmaps meaning this isn't an issue, but if you ever do enable them and a DDS hasn't got them it will crash the game so be careful - you can always use just the -DXT1 setting and ignore the mipmode one |
Some Options Breakdown
Some of these are not in the readme or not clear from the readme how they work. I've found these to be the most relevant for most texture work on diffuse textures (the other MTR ones it is recommended to use the settings above).
| Option Name | Values (if any) | Example | Description and Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| i | folder name | -i "in\*.*" | The input - in the example all files in the "in" folder in the same location as the exe, of any file extension |
| outdir | folder name | -outdir "out" | The output directory, in the example it is the "out" on in the same location as the exe |
| nostats | -nostats | Removes stats from the output to the console | |
| noprogress | -noprogress | Removes progress on converting things from the output to the console | |
| quiet | -quiet | Removes all console information (use this wisely - it really doesn't tell you what it's doing at all!) | |
| logfile | file name | -logfile log.txt | Log file, which contains all the progress and any issues |
| fileformat | dds / png / nwn then the type if DDS | -fileformat dds -DXT1 | Output file format. Don't use "nwn" anymore, that's for 1.69 only, use DDS instead. Use PNG usually when converting from DDS or similar. |
| DXT1 | -fileformat dds -DXT1 | Standard DDS file with no alpha transparency. Saves a significant magnitude of space compared to DXT5A if you don't need alpha. | |
| DXT5A | -fileformat dds -DXT5A | Standard DDS file with alpha transparency | |
| quality | 0 - 255 | -quality 10 | The DDS quality factor to use; it defaults to 255 so no need to include usually. |
| rescale | X Y | -rescale 512 512 | This is useful for doing all the rescaling of a large image into a smaller one (eg; for a portrait H, L, M, S, T variants all at once). Can produce the best results compared to doing the resizing out of crunch from my experiments - if you use powers of two! If you don't use powers of two look at the rescalemode option. |
| yflip | -yflip | Will flip on the Y axis, which can be required for converting to DDS files if your original image is "the right way up". | |
| deep | -deep | Recurse subdirectories | |
| recreate | -recreate | Recreate the subdirectories if "-deep" is used | |
| mipmode | UseSourceOrGenerate, UseSource, Generate, None | -mipmode none | The default is UseSourceOrGenerate, which is fine for 99% of NWN content, but for portraits you might want to use "-mipmode none" since it saves a lot of disk space and portraits don't use mipmaps by default. CAVEAT HOWEVER: Portraits can use mipmaps if the TXI file that changes this setting is overriden, meaning mipmaps plus the UI scaling of the game can correctly use them at different mipmap sizes as needed. The space saving isn't huge anyway, even at high resolutions, so probably not worth disabling since it can crash the game if a DDS file doesn't have a mipmap when it should. |