That you should try to use R5G6B5-compressed MSNs (you have that iin the drop-down). You have to either use DDSopt to visualize those maps (preview does normalize) or use some other form of re-normalization. The pictures won't be pleasing with a picture-viewer. And if it's okay in-game report back and suggest it. If not, there isn't anything which can prevent MSN to degrade inacceptably by compressing.

Ah excellent, since I was saivng space by compressing Xenius' _msn.dds files for Khajitts and Argonians to save VRAM (the artifacts from DXT compression were less noticeable than on the humanoid faces). Will give it a go!

Just making some tests this affirmation is wrong :


they are not the same the DXT1 compression introduces some quadrification in the texture that results in pixellated normal maps ... the msn is visible on bodies that the nomoreblocky faces mod for example fixes smoothing them out ... I guess this is also valid for the disfuse maps especially in the low format ones that shoudl introduce quadrifications and subtle pixellation ...

DXT1 and DXT3 and DXT5 introduce almost the same "quadrification", the differences are so tiny you have to make a evaluation of gigabytes of textures to find them.
Normal-maps are a problematic case because you have only 2 DoF on the unit-sphere, so when you connect two points on the unit-sphere (start and end "palette" entry in the DXT) you get a streight arc, which means you are left with 1 DoF after compression.
Color-maps are not that much of a problem because the connection between two points can cross the entire RGB cube. You can't get R & G & B in the same block, but such color-full textures are rare.

Someone should link all the major modders who created texture packs to this thread. Might help

No the quadrification is very much evident and ingame shows up with a pixellated result on the normal maps , I have tried those and I reverted to DXT 5 ...

I was referring to the differences in the "quadrification". For practical perpuses there is no difference between DXT1 and DXT3/5.

I have been reading through both threads, this and the DDSopt one. I'm not quite sure though, as I look through my textures folder, which ones I should probably avoid running through DDSopt... for example, are the face textures still having problems? Are there any other types that I should avoid?

Thank you so much for your work!

No, no problems I know of.

Anybody run Bethesda's HiRes pack through DDSopt? What's the verdict?

Actually I have Shaved only 41M off, most files weren't altered (apart from being re-mipped with DDSOpt's quality mipmapping)

Thank you very much for making this post, Martigen! And thanks to all the nice people who gave so much useful information as well.

I'm especially happy to now know why the normal maps in Oblivion looked to crappy. I mean, two of my teachers worked on various meshes of the game (slaughterfish, mask of Clavicus, various statues of Daedra princes etc.) and the original models were gorgeous while the ingame version looked terrible in comparison.

As a side note I would say that aside compression, some thingsI would blame is the retexturing mods are:

• Mods that only stretch the texturing up to 2048^2 or even 4096^2 without adding any more detail. Eventually the contrasts are higher or the diffuse is sharpened. In the end it just increase the weight of the texture maps for no reason. Worse are the mods tend to make larger textures for objects not requiring them like bread or pillows.
  
• I tend to think making only few objects HD is wrong for another reason: texel ratio. If you have an HD slice of bread in your vanilla environment it will likely stand out, reminds you the other textures aren't as detailed and eventually break a bit the immersion. And make the environment look less beautiful in comparison. More can be less.
  
• Texturers should also pay attention to the color palette they're using. I've seen some mods with rather good texturing job but the colors didn't fit with the Skryim palette and the retextured elements were standing out. There are already some objects in vanilla Skryim that weren't color-corrected very well and stand out a bit time to time, we don't need more obviously. To avoid this texturers should look after ingame items bearing the colors they want to use, pick the colors and see how they fit together, how they fit their artistic vision etc. And test the model ingame to see how the texture is affected by lighting and post-process of course!

These are among the first things I learned during texturing classes. It's a bit less technical but I tend to think it's still good to for texturers to remember these basic points.

I think this thread should be widely spread indeed. I'm going to link it on http://tesmods.blogspot.com/2012/02/starting-up.html as soon as we add a tutorial about texturing. (btw if anyone wants to contribute with tutos, hints and tips, everything's welcome!)

Just want to point out there's a new texture compression mod on Nexus -- the http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=12801.

It appears to work very similarly to DDSOpt, perhaps with some differences in how decisions are made when optimising textures, and including a quality resizer for those wishing to reduce texture dimensions to save VRAM.

Check it out and post your experiences here.

Wow, absolutely invaluable.. thanks for this, I was saving textures with no alpha's as DXT5.. I will ensure all are correct before release..

Before reading this post, I knew I was bad at texturing. Now... I know I'm actually quite worse.

That's why tools like DDSOpt and Texture Optimizer are helpful If you forget to save a DDS in the right format (or, I guess, think about saving it in an optimal format) these tools will do it for you. In some cases it can't determine what that is, so it is generally better to save them right first time, but if you're a texture artist running the tools on your mod would at least highlight files you could re-save, or change the format of, prior to releasing.

Whelp, there's a third texture optimising tool up now!

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=13529

This gives us three tools to use for optimising textures and reducing VRAM usage. As I have negative free time at the moment, would be great if someone felt the need to compare all three and give an overview of pros/cons

To redress, we have:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5755
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=12801
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=13529

As an author of SMTO I can name its distinctive features

- Multithreaded, very fast, can utilize almost 100% of CPU
- Simple and fully automated
- Has no quality/compression settings or presets, because the main goal was to optimize textures with as minimal quality loss as possible. Utility was already configured that way.
- Can unpack BSAs, optimize textures they contain and pack them back (with BSA compression)

Texture Optimiser has more optimization techniques and results in a slightly higher dds textures size reduce, but SMTO can also handle BSAs and many many times faster.

Now I'm experimenting with BSA compression. Some file types don't support compression at all, e.g. sounds stop playing if they are in a compressed BSA.
Maybe that's why Bethesda divided vanilla BSAs into categories... they all have different archivation settings.

@ Martigen and everyone who has contributed to this topic - Thank you

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=14504

(Yeah I know, blatant bumping of topic - But this topic needs to be seen periodically, will be linking it in the next re-do of my file description)

Thanks for this topic, lots of excellent information in here. This topic should be 'stickied', or at least added to creationkit.com

It used to be correct from what I've read here, but it seems now that Skyrim HD 2k is riddled with improperly compressed diffuse maps. The entirety of both the city and dwemer ruin textures I have seem to be heavily laden with diffuse maps containing extraneous DXT3/5 alphas.