Skin-tone problem

[-Mallow-]

I've been wondering the reason why some people when using a skintone I created makes their sims black, does anyone have idea because I truly do not. For me the skin works all fine with all tone ramps. All the skinfiles are DXT5, toneramps are DXT3 and the skininator is CmarNyc's latest one.

edit: come to think of it, all these texture file problems started ever since I started using that new DDS plugin for Photoshop 64bit. Wonder if this is also because of it.

[whiterider]

Pure black skin is usually a sign of a missing texture, for whatever reason. I don't know why that would affect some downloaders but not everyone, though. Have you tested it without any other CC - in case you've accidentally created a dependency somehow? I know that twallan's DebugEnabler can pull the TGI refs for all the textures on an object from in-game - perhaps it can do a similar thing for sims, which would allow you to check that all the TGI refs are what you would expect them to be?

Maybe it's an LN muscle/boob slider issue?

[-Mallow-]

I tried the skin tone once with pure vanilla game and it worked fine, but I tested it again just moment ago without any other CC and it works still fine for me... I never thought skintone could bring me so much trouble. I guess I should give try to Twallan's mod, perhaps it could find the fault.

So LN muscle/boob slider can affect this somehow? I also wonder if there is compatibility issue as if you are missing some EP it wouldn't work. although I always believed it doesn't matter for cc such as skin-tones to require any EP.

[CmarNYC]

Didn't you have problems related to the 64-bit plugin in another thread? Maybe it's buggy?

Edit: If the skintone is the old version and not compatible with LN the muscle/boob sliders won't work. Don't know what happens if you use a new version LN-compatible skin with an unpatched game, though - the TONE format is different and I guess it could cause the 'absent texture' black skin. Can you ask the people who are having this problem if their game is patched up to date?

[-Mallow-]

Didn't you have problems related to the 64-bit plugin in another thread? Maybe it's buggy?

Edit: If the skintone is the old version and not compatible with LN the muscle/boob sliders won't work. Don't know what happens if you use a new version LN-compatible skin with an unpatched game, though - the TONE format is different and I guess it could cause the 'absent texture' black skin. Can you ask the people who are having this problem if their game is patched up to date?

Yes indeed, so much trouble that I believe I'd better install photoshop 32bit back with its DDS plugin. I try to ask if the ones who have the skin turn black do not have the game patched to LN compatible. And if it's so then perhaps I should use older version of skininator if I can find it from my backup files, unless there is one for download still.

[BloomsBase]

Why are you using DXT5?
Skintone files are DXT1
DXT5 has a extra black layer wich might be the layer people see :)
Always try to stick to the games format!
Save as DXT1noalpha

[CmarNYC]

Bloom, as far as I know the only difference between DXT1 and DXT5 is that DXT1 has no alpha information. Maybe the black layer you're seeing is the alpha?

Anyway, you're right sticking to EA format is best. In skintones I don't think alpha is used anyway.

[BloomsBase]

Custom DDS textures showing as 'black'

If you've got some custom textures which need their DDS counterparts doing you may (have) run into this problem where textures appear 'black' in both the editor and the game. This happens because the wrong compression algorithm has been used on one of the images; usually the normalmap is at fault because it uses a 'special' algorithm that only ATI's Compressonator can process, using anything else tends to 'black' out the images when used.

Here is a nice article about the DXT format:
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/32/43/324337_324337.pdf

I am facing some lag on some of my creations and want to try ATI's compressonator instead.
Maybe you want to try it out also?
http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/textures/making-dds-using-ati-compressonator.php


And i was wrong about the alpha layer, the skintone does have one....fully black

[whiterider]

That's strange - I always assumed DDS were related to D3D and thus primarily a nVidia thing.

[CmarNYC]

Thanks for the refs, Bloom!

[-Mallow-]

Oh so that appears to be the cause of the problem. I read once that DXT5 is for skin tone files ("When you save it as a DDS make sure you save as either DTX3 or DTX5") so I kept using it but good to know it is supposed to be DXT1 instead. Thank you for all the help :)

[whiterider]

Don't miss Bloom's edit!
And i was wrong about the alpha layer, the skintone does have one....fully black

[-Mallow-]

Oh I see, I did miss that edit of Bloom. But Now I am quite confused. So this could not work saved as DXT1 after all? if the DXT5 format was not wrong then I suppose I have no idea what to do to make this work.

And about the ATI's compressonator, I have been using it sometimes since saving in photoshop into DDS gives major quality loss sometimes while the compressonator gives a bit better result.

[BloomsBase]

it is caused by the plugin, redo your textures.
You can also try DXTbmp, it also does a good job.

[-Mallow-]

it is caused by the plugin, redo your textures.
You can also try DXTbmp, it also does a good job.

a dumb question: how do I then save the files into DXTbmp? I assume the Nvidia DDS plugin doesn't have that option but I should get DXTbmp tool for that?

[whiterider]

DXTbmp is a program which converts other image types - probably png or gif, though I'm not sure on that - into DDS.

[-Mallow-]

DXTbmp is a program which converts other image types - probably png or gif, though I'm not sure on that - into DDS.

Oh I see, thank you Whiterider for the quick respond :)

[BloomsBase]

i used it to repair corrupt DDS textures.
I often had problems with the Nvidia plugin when trying to save a DXT1noalpha, it always put a alpha to it with all kind of errors.(like the sparkles you had earlier)
So i then saved it as png for web(24bit) and opened that file in DXTbmp, then exported it as DDS