CGTalk - DDS textures: Possible to animate?

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Kenny Bania

11-03-2005, 11:43 AM

Ok, not really sure if anyone will know what I am talking about but here goes... ;)

Am editing textures for PC games. The textures extract as .dds (direct draw surfaces I believe) and I can edit and create them in Photoshop with a free plugin.

But what I want to know is, if it is possible to have these textures animate?
I know in the PS view I can see the different mipmaps, shown as progressively small images etc, but is it possible to make one .dds texture animate?

I've seen Unreal Tournament 2004 have 'skins' for characters that animate. For example a robot with moving and flashing lights. But they use .utx textures.

Any help and info is greatly appreciated!!

Thanks for your time :)

EricChadwick

11-04-2005, 03:43 PM

Sure you can, just use a sequence of separate DDS files. We do this all the time. You can batch-convert TGA or whatever file format into DDS files using the Nvidia or ATI tools. But you need to use a format your game engine supports. Ours supports the IFL text list that 3ds max uses, works well.

EricChadwick

11-04-2005, 03:46 PM

In fact, here's an example I shared with someone else not long ago...

This is an animated height map I created with the Dreamscape ocean plugin.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/movies/waterbump_128x128_60frames.MOV

And here it is in action, applied as a bump map to a reflective surface in-game.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/movies/dreamscape_waterbump.mov

Kenny Bania

11-05-2005, 09:33 PM

Thanks for the reply! I really appreciate it :)

So it's not possible to have a single dds file to store and contain more than one frame and make it animate?

I'm very new to this and just trying to replace (ugly, low quality) textures in a sports game on PC with better one's I can create.
But I don't think the game allows for more than 1 dds file. It can import bmp and png, as well as the dds format the game originally uses.

So you have to replace 1 with another I believe.

Thanks again for the help!

EricChadwick

11-07-2005, 03:34 PM

Ah. If you're trying to modifiy an existing game, then yes you need to replace the existing single texture with another single texture. Depending on the game, it may also need to be the same dimensions and sometimes the same DDS format (there are several DDS flavors).

If the game doesn't animate the texture, then you are probably out of luck. Does the game come with a 3D Editor of some kind? If so you might be able to recompile the level with your own totally-different-format textures.

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