I’m sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but I haven’t been able to find a straightforward solution.
Long story short, I create a TIFF in ZBrush or Xnormal to use in Maya and no errors. BUT if I then modify the aforementioned TIFF in Photoshop I get ‘wrong data type 7’ errors out the wazoo.
How do I resolve these errors?
Ive gotten those errors in the past, and so I’ve generally avoided the tif format because of compatibility problems in general. Any reason why you dont use exr?
Oh… well, I didn’t know very much about exr other than that they are recommended for 32 bit displacement maps. I think XNormal only outputs in tif so that’s why.
Note that they’re warnings, not errors–as far as I know they don’t break anything.
I get these all the time. It’s annoying, since there can be a lot of them and the spam makes other warnings harder to see. I think it’s a libtiff thing, since I’ve seen other programs output the exact same warning.
EXR only works with 32-bit, or at least Photoshop only offers it for 32-bit images. PNG is fine for 8-bit and 16-bit images, though they’re very slow to save in Photoshop unless you disable compression. One of the nice things about TIFF is that it works for 8-, 16- and 32-bit, so you don’t have to use a bunch of different formats for each. PSD will do it, but Maya is bad at that format…
Ok, so they’re warnings and not errors, thank you for the helpful distinction. I guess at this point it would be helpful if there was a script which disabled all warnings relevant to that for the specific reason you state, that it’s a nuisance and can make it impractical to spot other warnings that the user might want to see.
PSDs? I’ve been meaning to research PSDs in Maya because I like the thought of using them but the problem is that my colors seem to be altered/darker and I’ve never gotten around to researching why that is.
How is PSD support in Maya 2015?
I tried this briefly when I was checking file formats before. The default texture node doesn’t support them at all. There’s a PSD texture node, but when I used that, Maya spammed this endlessly:
Error: Failed to open IFF file for reading : C:/Users/me/AppData/Local/Temp//maya********.iff
This error alternated between two different IFF filenames, leaked memory and didn’t display the texture. The PSD was just a flattened background that I created in a few seconds in CS6.
A separate texture file node type is a pain anyway, and you also can’t just drag in PSDs, you have to create the texture node yourself and copy in the filename, so I think I’ll stick with PNG, TIFF and EXR. They’re easier to manipulate anyway.
I’d look at color management if colors are different. I don’t know if Maya pays attention to color profile settings in PSDs, but you could try assigning the right profile. (Photoshop tends to default to Dot Gain 20% for greyscale, which is print and usually wrong for everyone else, but I don’t think that default gets saved to PSDs.)
I have been perplexed by this issue for many years. I work in the simulator industry, flight simulators and such, and I use Photoshop to build the textures used in the 3D models on the simulator. The “wrong data type 7 for RichTIFFIPTC” warning has been a thorn in my side for years. As mentioned it is fairly benign but the warnings are obnoxious and in my case, critical warnings and/or errors can get lost in the mix if you’re not paying close enough attention. So today I decided to do some testing and get this issue resolved. I have what for me is a good fix.
I won’t bore you with the details but what I found is that if I take the offending tiff texture(s) and save them all out as .rgb format, which is the SGI format, and then save them back to tiff, the warning goes away on the new tiff files.
I have a Photoshop plugin that allows me to read and write .rgb files. I think its fairly easy to find online. My plugin asks if I want to compress the image when saving the rgb file. My testing indicated that it doesn’t matter but for mine I answered no to the question. So far I not seen any image degradation from this process.
You could probably do the “conversion” of the images by recording the actions in Photoshop and running that action on your image directory. I think the problem with that might be that the action recording function in Photoshop can’t record mouse actions so whenever user input is required from the action you have to click the mouse. That can get tedious if you are doing a lot images.
I have an application called “Hot Keyboard Pro” which is a macro recorder. You just get the app recording, run through your repetitive task, mouse clicks and all, and save. The recorded macro can the be run on whatever you want. Using Hot Keyboard I was able to get it set up so that I could convert 250 images to rgb, then do the same thing writing them back to tiff all by itself.
Now all of the nasty warnings are gone!!
My test case was set up to save every format available to Photoshop. When I ran the tests I did JPEG and BMP formats first and then I did the RGB format and it worked so I stopped. There might be another image format that would work as well as RGB.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Scott