What's Your Preferred File Texture Format?

[JamesMK]

Well, ummm... Targa here. Old habit. The advantages are well known: widespread support (it's actually quite difficult to find an app that does not support TGA), has alpha channel, non-lossy yet fairly compact. If I need more bits per channel, environment maps for instance, I usually store those as TIFFs at 16/32 bpp.



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[Cameo]

Bah no .iff? :twisted:

[xissburg]

I dont know exactly why but I always used TGA

[scrimski]

Tiff. I can save and edit layers in PS with it, so it's quite handy for manipulating textures.

[Cameo]

In answer to the original question i generally use uncompressed .tif

[h2o]

tif ... cause I need to use Renderman sometimes

pic is my favorite from Sofimage till now. It save space & have a little bit compression, but it looks fine.

[soulburn3d]

Png.

Jpgs are lossy so I can't save multiple times. Tgas are limited as a format. And until the past few years, there were so many different flavors of tiffs and not all pieces of software would read all the varieties. However, tifs do handle 16bit and float images better than pngs in my experience. But in general, png is lossless and compresses really nice, and so most of my textures are png.

- Neil

[madmenno]

I just use JPG for normall textures. Tiffs when i need alpha or mipmapping.

Why you people don't use JPG for just normall textures that don't need special things? It's the smallest and quality is good to right? If theres something wrong with JPG plz tell me, i would change too now, but till now it worked best for me. Easy to handle, small in size and good quality made me choose it.

[soulburn3d]

The problem is this, everytime you save a jpg you lose quality. Try taking a jpg, save it, then reopen it, save it again, reopen it, do this say 10-20 times. You'll start to notice artifacts growing and growing. So everytime you modify it you're reducing the quality, and if you do that too much, you'll start to see it, even on high quality settings.

If you keep around the original psd, and then always modify that, and save to jpg from your original, then you won't have that problem, and that's the only way I'd ever advise using jpgs for textures.

One last note, jpgs are small on your harddrive, but most renderers will uncompress it to render, so if you have a tif and a jpg that's the same size, the texture in memory is likely to be the same size, even though it's a different size on disk.

- Neil

[madmenno]

Hey great answere wow! I always used to work in psd and make that a jpg. But i am gonna change to tiff now for all my textures.

[TogaMario]

I enjoy the TGA file format. It has alpha support and I've never had any quality issues with them.

[bonestructure]

Depends on the texture and what it goes on. I use high quality Jpegs for things like cloth etc. Tiffs for anything close up, and PSDs for UV unwrapped meshes, so that I can change them if need be. I've gotten to the point, as my texture skills increase, of needing my textures to be at least 1000 X 1000.

[ThirdEye]

I always use tiff, but sometimes even layered psd's since C4D can recognize the layers.

[lazzhar]

TIF for rendering and textures. And it's just a habbit I guess.

[salmonmoose]

PSD whilst I'm working on the texture - then PNG for the final version, it's a nice simple format and pretty easy to build your own decoder for :)

[RALawrence]

Same here, PSD while working on textures. TGA, TIFF, or PNG for final versions. Just depends on my mood :p and what the texture is needed for. I use TGA for all my renders.

[bjorke]

I can't answer this because DDS is missing.

DDS is the far-and-away most common format for game artists.

[warprat]

I like PNG nice format. used jpeg before a bit dodgy at times. as for tif and TGA well They are sort of big are'nt they.

[claudiogen]

Very Interesting Poll. I keep a .psd as working file and then save out a .png or .jpg. Some stores/sites only accept jpg and gif because of the download size.

Claudio

[kabojnk]

Targa here... got in the habit of using it dealing with Valve's Source engine. It loves TGAs and the alpha channel you can provide with it.

Other than that, i like using PNGs or TIFF

[PhuongDPh]

My final format is jpg and my start format is ... http://forums.cgsociety.org/images/icons/icon10.gif

[THyRoID]

TGA

but I also use DDS since that was drilled into my head @ school.

[psyop63b]

Pardon my ignorance :blush: but I've never heard of DDS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw_Surface) or EXR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR) formats. What software is used to develop these files?

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[Anthonie]

DDS is being used in Engines (mostly older engines)
DDS images looks ok from normal distance but loses alot of detail when u zoom in.
DDS files are also very small so I think PS2 gamedevelopers could have a great use for this.

Personally I like Targa but TIFF is just as good (or maybe a little bit better)
These two files are called losseless image files. They preserve all the details and keeps image as good as possible. So when u zoom in u don't lose detail as much as DDS of JPG or other files.

[Anthonie]

Leigh. What's .Exr? Advantages/disatvantages

[leigh]

EXR is a high dynamic range image format, meaning it gives you a much larger bandwidth for colour, allowing a far greater scope for adjustment and control.

The only disadvantage I can think of with using EXR is that the file sizes are quite large. Other than that, it's a great format to work with due to its flexibility.

[Anthonie]

ok now you wake me up. it's same like hdr wich also is litterly high dynamic range (image).
And since u woke me up I did work with EXR :D. I remember filesizes of 50 mb with that format. So yeah they are big but great since they have light energy stored in the image itself (I think)

[yencaray]

I've recently been using Tiffs. I'll have the source texture thats in tiff format with all the layers and adjustments This file is used to save out .jpg versions. And along the texturing process i'll save out .jpg versions for use in the 3d app. So in rendering i'll use .jpg that arrive from the uncompressed tiff file.

[InTerceptoV]

I use targa for most of the textures but I convert alsmost all of them to map format as i progress through scene building. As for the render format, OpenEXR with floating point depth...

[Greg-Jackson]

Normally I used .jpg for texturing. But now i'm playing with .png files.

Although I am now looking into .exr too, just to learn more :D

[DeletedPenguin]

TGA for the win!

[NeptuneImaging]

Sorry to unbury the old dog bones but I use PSD's as a start and I either use PIC files or TIFF files set to 32 bit Floating Point for final textures. For things like skies, I love to use EXR files....it makes everything look so pretty....

[bonestructure]

Pardon my ignorance, but what's an EXR file? I don't see it listed in my photoshop file formats and I've never heard of it before. Perhaps you could elucidate.

[Greg-Jackson]

bonestructure:
Your not ignorant because you ask questions... ;)

Here, a direct quote from http://www.openexr.com/

"OpenEXR is a high dynamic-range (HDR) image file format developed by Industrial Light & Magic for use in computer imaging applications."

Go to thier website, download the thing, wham it in photoshop, and before you know it, your opening .exr format files ;)

Good luck!

[octopus7]

I started out using on jpg's as my main image / texture files especially when I was working with GMAX to make add-on buildings for the Simcity 4 game.
(my buildings are on the www.simtropolis.com (http://www.simtropolis.com) site under the name octopus7)
Jpegs were fine for this sort of work because the final renders were done zoomed away from the object so most texture detail appeared washed out.
Now I start out with PSD's then when i'm ready to use them in Max I save them as TGA's because as others have said there are many advantages for using them.

[QuantumPixel]

I definitly keep a PSD file for any chainges and save of uncompressed jpgs for Mental ray render. if need be I will use tiff or tga.

png sounds interesting I shall take a look into this format over the next couple of days.

thanks.

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