NoMansSky:Texture Formats: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:40, August 8, 2020

Texture Formats

No Man's Sky mainly uses DDS format to encode its textures but can also accepts some other formats such as PNG, JPEG, and PSD as per Horde3D specification (to be confirmed). As such, it is highly recommended to use the Intel Texture Works plugin for Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net or any image editor of your choice with DDS file handling capabilities.

Textures are called by Material description files.

Accepted Texture Maps

Diffuse Map

This texture stores main object colors.

RGB channels - color information for your albedo map.
Alpha channel - this channel is mostly used for transparency but could also be used for metalness or emissive areas. As such, you can't have a texture that is transparent and emissive for example.

Mask Map

The mask map contains other color information used by NMS.

Red channel - ambient occlusion bakes are attached here. As of Atlas Rises, most new textures no longer use an AO map and seem to just have this channel colored pure white (basically no AO).
Green channel - a gloss map is used here. Despite the material settings specifying this should be a roughness map, the way they look in the textures implies it's really a gloss map, basically an inverted roughness map.
Blue channel - has something to do with detail textures but is largely unused for most models.
This channel appears to be for determining where custom colors are applied while base building
- White - receives primary color
- Grey - receives secondary color (#7b7b7b has been used successfully)
- Black - retains original texture color
Alpha channel - (most likely unused, but unknown at this time)

Normal Map

As of the NEXT update, the Red and Green channels are flipped in the normal maps. In other words, whatever is usually in the Red channel should be placed in the Green channel and vice versa. Template:Notice Small

Atlas Terrain Texture Formats

The Atlas terrain texture files are located in TEXTURES/ATLASES/TERRAIN.

These textures are slightly different to the standard textures as they are volume textures and each file 1 main image and 10 mip-maps.

Each Terrain is defined by 3 textures, each in a specific .DDS format:

Diffuse: Compression DXT1, 16-bit colors and 1-bit alpha

HSV: Compression DXT1, 16-bit colors and 1-bit alpha; These files appear to be HSV versions of the RGB diffuse map, however, this isn't confirmed.

Normal

Compression DXT5, 16-bit colors and interpolated alpha

Red channel - most likely a heightmap for texture blending (to be confirmed)
Green channel - normal map for X
Blue channel - appears to be an inverted specularity map (to be confirmed)
Alpha channel - normal map for Y

Template:NMSPageClose

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 == Accepted Texture Maps ==
 === Diffuse Map ===
-The basic diffuse is practically the same as a basic 2D texture in most engines. The map contains RGB data containing the albedo colors for your object's texture. It is important to take note of the way channels are read by shaders.
+This texture stores main object colors.
 * RGB channels - color information for your albedo map.
-* Alpha channel - this channel is used for metalness, transparency, and emissive textures.
+* Alpha channel - this channel is mostly used for transparency but could also be used for metalness or emissive areas. As such, you can't have a texture that is transparent and emissive for example.
-*: All these material flags are read from the same channel; as such, you can't have all of these flags running at once.
 === Mask Map ===