jpg to paa/pac ?

[seafire6]

If this is a completely foolish question please forgive me as I'm new to modding but is there anyway to convert jpg textures to the ofp/aa friendly paa/pac format ?

[seafire6]

Disregard the question I found the the texview program.

[Jackal326]

Be careful when converting JPEG/JPG files, because if you have a completely white part of the texture, you'll sometikes get colour bleed and end up with the edges being pink

[J W]

Or download PAAplug for Adobe Photoshop here.

Description

Quote[/b] ]- PAAplug:PAA format plugin for Adobe Photoshop for reading and saving OFP/Armed Assault PAA textures. It is currently a bit experimental since it violates some Photoshop plugin rules so save your work before using it. Some features are also still missing such as saving with swizzling.

So, load the jpg-file in Photoshop, and save it as paa or pac

JW

[MehMan]

On a side note, why does ArmA insist on using paa/pac which IMO rapes the textures, I mean at least in OFP they looked nice before going ingame, but once ingame they looked like shite. Was it just OFP or is that the same in ArmA?

It looked as if the texture was saved into a jpg similar format with the same compression, which in turn meant wierd color pixels on some parts of the textures.

[DM]

On a side note, why does ArmA insist on using paa/pac which IMO rapes the textures, I mean at least in OFP they looked nice before going ingame, but once ingame they looked like shite. Was it just OFP or is that the same in ArmA?

It looked as if the texture was saved into a jpg similar format with the same compression, which in turn meant wierd color pixels on some parts of the textures.

Because its a suiltable texture format for games.

Jpeg is a bitch for the gfx card to handle.
Tga and BMP are MASSIVE (16Mb for a 2048x2048 tga).
And 90% of the other formats are proprietry to the people who created the software for it.

DXT has also been a part of directX since version 6, so it allows for easy inclusion into peoples game engines (since if they are already using directX they may as well use the texture handlers)

[MehMan]

What about DDS?

[DM]

DDS is just another way (format) of storing DXTn textures (as Paa and Pac are)

So the limitations of the DXT format are still there.

[seafire6]

Thank you all for the input, particularly the paa plugin for photoshop. Hopefully AA tools will smooth out this process of importing models etc. from 3d studio max or gmax (+/-) the textures. Considering how important addons are to the success of a game these days it would be in BIS interests to make it a fairly smooth and staight forward operation.

[])rStrangelove]

I had no luck with saving a PAA from Photoshop - textures looked all black in ArmA.

It works when i save the texture as TGA in PS and then have it converted by PAA-Tool back to PAA.

Do i have play around with Filter/Dither settings in PS ?