First post here and pretty new to Blender although I have followed some tuts and have a basic (very basic) understanding of things.
Im wondering if its possible to use .DDS files in Blender… long story short I paint skins for racing sims and have made a skin Id like to render. I can import the 3D model of the car into Blender and (I think) I know how to actually put it on the model but the skin (which was painted on a template in CS2) was saved in the .DDS file format as thats the format that works with the sim.
Is there any way I can use the .DDS file and get it on the 3D model of the car in Blender and then do a nice render or is this not possible atm with Blender?
I hope the above makes some kind of sense. :o
Any info or help either way will be very much appreciated.
Yes, several times but I`m obviously doing something wrong then…
Ive got a 3D model as I say, and Im pretty sure I know how to use a texture to get it to show on the model but when I browse for the .DDS file Id like to use it doesnt even show up, there`s nothing to select/open.
Sorry if I`m not seeing the wood for the trees or making a noob mistake but this is all pretty new to me.
I didn’t know Blender supports .dds. Not hacking games much.
What i suggested was to convert .dds to .png, which, i know for sure, Blender supports. ImageMagick is available for all more or less popular OSes; i suppose command line is supported on win also. If that does not work, i’ve seen Gimp running on windows. It has plugin for dds - second link.
So, in theory, what i suggested would get you converted images to use in Blender. If dds wouldn’t work, naturally…
@tjc69
nvm… I run over one more bit of working with dds - https://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=676 - used to play it but did not know it uses this format. Since you mentioned CS… I wonder if that nvidia PS addon would work.
Speaking Linux, if you have more or less decent pc, any linux run on Virtual Box might do such convert (and much more ofc).
It would be excellent if 10 years later blender could convert *.dds image format automatically, so it is a huge fun when you have more than 100 materials in the scene with that kind of textures.
All of this is nice if you need to convert a DDS file to PNG, but the fact that the GAME ENGINE probably doesn’t support PNG ( some sims will support either PNG, but originally made with DDS as its native format) I don’t know which SIM you are using in this case, so I can’t tell if it supports PNG or not.
The main problem is there are different formats of DDS … the SIM probably uses either or both DXT1 or DXT5…DXT1 is just RGB and DXT5 is RGB = interpolated Alpha both of which Blender supports…
I would need a copy of one of the DDS files to see the format as there are several that Blender does not support and it sounds like yours are one of them…
The Nvidia Texture Tools Exporter can open and convert your DDS files…and does a better job of it…
