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Texture Guidelines

What does VastPark support?

Below is a list of Texture formats VastPark Supports:

  • .jpg
  • .png
  • .tga
  • .dds

JPG

JPG or JPEG is a lossy format, designed for a good visual appearance and a high compression ratio. It introduces small differences compared to the original image, but this is rarely visible when using default or better quality when saving the JPG image.
Unfortunately graphics cards cannot read JPEG compression so they get expanded to DXT internally, so the quality you lose from using JPEG compression has no benefit.

PNG

PNG is lossless format, but compressed, so it's has a file size equivalent to what it would if zipped up. PNG also supports greyscale, making it ideal for monochrome maps, as it'll cut file sizes by 75%.
PNG images can contain an 8-bit alpha layer or "transparency" channel, which can be hard to work with.

TGA

TGA is a lossless format, and supports alpha content via alpha channels. By default, TGA files are converted to the DXT1 compression format internally, or DXT3 if they contain alpha.
You can save a TGA as 24-bit if it has no alpha, or 32-bit if it has an alpha.

DDS

DDS is faster, smaller and perfectly suited to rendering in DirectX. It’s the native DX format and every other format gets converted to DDS on loading, resulting in longer loading times.
It’s also the only format that has hardware compression support (JPG gets decompressed on load time using the CPU).
DDS gives you full control over the texture attributes and color format, it also supports alpha channels and cubic environment maps.

Which Texture format do I use?

We recommend using DDS as it is the native DirectX format and is faster as they dont require decompression in memory.

Use DXT1 textures as much as is possible, the greatest space savings can be had with them. If watching for rendering artifacts is not an option, DXT5 supports the most flexible alpha channels, while not increasing memory usage beyond that of a normal 8-bit palletized texture.

There are a number of DDS tools available in the Tools section at the bottom of this page.

Texture Dimensions

Texture dimensions should be any powers of two from 32 to 4096 and don't need to be square.
For Example:

256x256, 1024x128, 2048x32 are all acceptable.

Non Power of two textures will work but will be internally scaled to the next power of two which wastes memory.
If you need to use such textures do so for testing purposes only.

Keep in mind the larger the texture the larger the file size. This will increase IMML load time as the end user needs to download each asset.
We recommmend using textures no larger than 2048 x 2048 px to keep load time to a minimum.

Texture Maps

VastPark supports a number of different per model, they include:

  • Ambient Map
  • Diffuse Map
  • Emissive Map
  • Specular Map
  • SpecularHighlight Map
  • Normal Map
  • AmbientOcclusion Map

Tools