Hello! I hope you don't mind an ask such as this, but I was wondering how you managed to get such a great recolor quality from the D Lister's chair from the toddler pack. I recolored it last week and found that when I imported the textures in S4S they were of horrid quality (like a jpeg saved with the highest compression possible, 5 times). I realized the exported DDS wasn't the size it was supposed to be. I thought I'd ask you how you did it because I really wanted to recolor that chair.
Hi there!
Checking my files, the texture is 512x512, which is pretty standard ime.
I export and import as png for the most part, unless a texture has issues when imported, in which case I export as png and import in dds.
png files are what is known as lossless, which, as the name suggests, means they don’t lose any information when they are saved. dds files are lossy (at least dtx5 is, which is what you’ll be using), which means some information is lost each time it is saved in that format (because of the compression method).
So, when you export as png you can play around with the texture as much as you want and keep saving your stages and templates etc as png, and their quality will never deteriorate. The more you save as dds, the more pixellation and crunchiness will be introduced.
When you import a png into S4S it will convert it to dds for you. Sometimes that’s just fine. For things like hair it can cause some problems (or at least it has for me when I’ve tried recolouring hair), so in cases like that it can be better to save in dds yourself. But you can still do any intermediate saving in png until you have your very last version ready to import.
I export and import all normals and speculars in dds, because it makes them easier to work with, and to avoid any issues.
Now, the original texture for the D Lister chair does already have some pixellation. In cases like that I tend to do a bit of cleanup work on it first (even if I’m going to be making the end result grungy). My most trusty tool is the smudge tool in Photoshop. I go over any areas of pixellation and try to blend them carefully into the surrounding area so it all looks smooth. It doesn’t usually take too long, but it depends on the complexity of the texture, and how much needs working on. I’ve tried using noise reduction filters in the past but it’s difficult to preserve the texture sometimes, so I find going in by hand gives me a better result. You can also try using the healing and clone tools if you need to remove something altogether, or just straight up use the eyedropper tool to select the right colour and the brush tool to paint right over the offending area. Definitely try the smudge tool first, though.
I used the smudge tool a lot when I was recolouring peacemaker’s panel walls. They were really great, but the saving process had introduced some pixellated banding that was more obvious on some colours than others. The smudge tool worked an absolute dream to get rid of that, and meant I could start from a properly clean texture.
Honestly, the smudge tool. It’s the future.
Checking my files I don’t have a cleaned up version of the D Lister chair - it seems I only have 2 slightly grungy versions saved as templates. There’s still some pixellation there, but on such small textures it’s difficult to avoid. I’d be happy to let you have those templates, but like I say they’re not clean, they have my grungy texture on them.
