anyone got a problem with the photoshop vtf plug-in making your textures all blochy? Makes my textures turn into squares. Any way to stop it?

Hasn't happened to me.

The squares are a symptom of DXTn compression. It divides your image up into little blocks and averages out the colours in each block to a smaller number to save space.

The effect is more apparent on images where there are fine gradients between colours, such as horizons in skyboxes or gradients on halos.

You should use one of the templates that come with the VTF plugin as they will give the optimal settings for saving your image.

However if you want to set them manually use DXT1 compression to save memory or DXT5 if your image has an alpha channel.

While there is a temptation to use uncompressed/RGBA8888 format, you can expect your image to take up 4 times as much RAM and graphics card memory and rape your GPU's transfer bandwidth.

humm I save it on DXT1 but I get the squares. Am I not suppose to change it from "Sharpen Soft" to "None"? And what should the Mipmap Filter by at? "Box"?

:confused:

Those filters only adjust the filters used when the MIP maps are created. It highly unlikely their causing the blockness.

Post a screenshot though so we can see exactly what your talking about.

http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/2849/untitled1copy0vc.jpg

the helmet looks pretty bad:p . Look at the original textures tho, they don't seem as blocky as the ones that I made...mabey its just something I'm doing, though I've never had this problem before.

Hmm trying to make the Germans more visible are you??? :mod:

No idea why its so block although in my experience even though red compresses badly with JPEG, its not that bad with DTXn.

BTW, you are using an original non-blocky image to start with aren't you? Its not a JPEG you've downloaded and are trying to tweak because that will introduce a lot of artifacts from the JPEG compression.

i started skinning directly from the VTF i extracted from the GCF. Dunno why it gets all blocky :(

Well theres bound to be some blockyness as their saved as DXTn format and you can get back the detail thats lost. That said red is very good colour for showing up artifacts, just one of those wierd things with nature.