Purple and green pixellation on clothing textures

[Esmeralda]

Hi all, I rarely make clothes because my textures always come out looking like crud no matter what I do. (Don't seem to have this problem with objects, hair or accessories though.) I've been trying to finish an outfit for this sim who I've been working on for about 3 months and I'm sick of the sight of him by now, ha ha. I don't know what it is with this outfit, but I can not get my textures to come out looking decent whatever I try.

I've tried saving the dds file (DXT5 interpolated alpha) in both Photoshop and DXTBmp and it always comes out pixellated and covered in green and purple splotches, despite it being greyscale. With Photoshop, it has small square pixellation and with DXTBmp it has big streaks and blotches. I start out by working in a png graphic for my texture, which saves OK each version (with dds it gets more blurry and pixellated with each save, so I work in png and then save the final version in dds), but as soon as I save as dds, it all goes down the pan.

An odd thing is that I thought it was OK this time, because it seemed to look OK in CAS, but when I put it in-game, it was all splotched as below:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/3/1/6/9/9/6/3/MTS_EsmeraldaF-1256744-adamcoatfail.jpg
Strange thing is that the colour saturation of the blotches looked far worse in-game than in this screenshot, which is odd - the splotches in the screenie look more greyish here, whereas when I was in-game actually taking this screenie they were pronouncedly purple and green.

Does anyone have any advice on what causes this problem and how to solve it? I really am at wit's end with this! Thanks in advance everyone!

[HystericalParoxysm]

I have a feeling this has to do with the "compositing" that the game does with sim textures. You'll also find it happens sometimes on naked/bare bodies too (on skintones). I think it'd be worth finding a copy of aWt's high quality mod (unfortunately no longer available from aWt as his blog is invite only or something now) to bump up the size of the composite textures used by the game and see if you're still getting the same thing that way.

[Esmeralda]

Thanks HP, I did some intensive googling and found various versions of the aWt mod on mediafire, will try it out tomorrow - from what I can tell from the sparse read-me file, it seems to be something that changes the in-game rendering but is not recommended for gameplay, so I'm not sure what the purpose of it is, is it a tool for testing textures in-game?

All things considered, I think I might have to just try remaking this outfit's texture as a stencil, which is how I made some of my previous sims' outfits and those don't seem to have the pixellation problem. Mysterious!

[HystericalParoxysm]

It's to make the game prettier, in short - essentially, the game composites together texture files for sims for better performance, but it reduces their quality. aWt's mod increases the size of the composites for better quality. It's not made to be used all the time, but I get no slowdown or issue with it compared to the game's normal lackluster performance, so I do actually play with it in.

[Esmeralda]

Ah, thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll try out the mod with both my present texture and a stencil version, and see what each of them looks like just out of interest!

[BloomsBase]

Also follow the games format on the textures.
Especially if you also create objects, like me. :)
CASp and objects use diffrent formats on multiplier/mask and specular, depending how many recolor options the item has.
Another mistake i made in the past is that the channels on the mask are diffrent between CASp and objects...


I had this bug when trying to save my specular as DXT1noalpha with the nvidia plugin.
But every time i reopen the file the plugin had added a alpha layer to the specular.

so i saved as BMP without alpha and opened that file with DXTBMP and then saved as DDS DXT1noalpha.
This fixed the problem on the clothing.

Similar things happen when saving a skintone texture as DXT5interpolatedalpha while it should be DXT1noalpha

If your looking for a good DDS tool, try ATI's Compressonator:
http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/textures/making-dds-using-ati-compressonator.php

[Esmeralda]

Thanks Bloom, I'll give Compressonator a try. My problem isn't just that the textures look purple/green pixellated in-game, they look like that before they go in-game, as soon as I save them as dds. Maybe I should try converting my original working file from png to bmp and see how that behaves when saved as dds? Wonder if it will make any difference?

I think I follow the game's format for texture files, I use DXT5 for all clothing texture files, is that right?

Re your problem with trying to save a specular texture with no alpha but you keep finding that the saved file has an alpha, is this happening with Photoshop, and is the alpha white? I've found that if I add a solid black alpha to a file where I don't want to have an alpha, and save it, then when opening it again it will have no alpha. That's how I make my speculars and my recolour masks. (That works with DXT5, don't know about DXT1 though.) Although, I always use a solid black specular for clothing (unless I specifically want it to look shiny, leather for instance), because I hate the shiny, rubbery look TS3 clothes have and prefer to minimise that look as much as possible!

UPDATE: Hmm, remade the texture file using Compressonator, and got the best result yet - texture file looked fairly smooth and non-purple/greeny. Yet, when I put it in game, I got this result:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/3/1/6/9/9/6/3/MTS_EsmeraldaF-1256958-adamcompressorised.jpg
Yuck. So it does look like the game is screwing it up too, it's not just Photoshop. Think I'll try the stencil route next...

[cmomoney]

I, as well as others, have been having this problem with objects also. It started happening after Pets :P.

[BloomsBase]

3 or 4 recolor coat?
Would you be willing to upload?

[Esmeralda]

I, as well as others, have been having this problem with objects also. It started happening after Pets :P.
Oh great, more problems to 'look forward' to! I'm still doing my creating in a non-Pets game (all XPs up to Generations), because I just don't trust the whole Pets/patch 1.26 thing - am waiting for Pets to be out for quite a while longer so that more of the problems can be identified and (hopefully) patched by EA.

(I have a separate installation of TS3 where I do have Pets installed, so I can enjoy playing with the animals, but for the moment I'd rather be safe than sorry when it comes to creating!)

3 or 4 recolor coat?
Would you be willing to upload?
It's a 3-colour outfit (coat, top and trousers). After going around in circles all afternoon getting more and more frustrated, I think I may have finally reached a compromise - I added a load of noise to the texture file and then when I packaged it with CTU, I set the coat and top to use subtle default fabric patterns rather than a solid colour as previously. Between the noise and the patterns, I think/hope it looks just about acceptable now:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/3/1/6/9/9/6/3/MTS_EsmeraldaF-1257048-improvedcoat.jpg
The coat looks like a sorta tweedy fabric now, which is not ideal as it was supposed to be a smooth fabric, but it's a lot better than looking like a complete mess like it was before!