NoMansSky:Texture Formats

 

Home

Tutorials

Tool Downloads

Reference Guides

Game Structure

Index

Join us on Discord!

 

Texture Formats

No Man's Sky uses mainly DDS images as texture maps but also accepts formats such as PNG, JPEG, and PSD as per Horde3D specification. As such, it is highly recommended to use the Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop, GIMP, or any image editor of choice with DDS file handling capabilities.

Due to the way shaders have been written, the arrangement of textures overall differ from what is more commonly known in other game engines. The most commonly used shader is called the Ubershader and functions similarly to Unity's Standard Shader (physically-based rendering) but with a few differences as discussed below and in the MATERIAL page.

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.

• RGB channels - color information for your albedo map.
• Alpha channel - this channel is used for metalness, transparency, and emissive textures.

  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

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