Mips, essentially, are smaller versions of the image stored in the same file that the game loads dynamically to spare resources. When saving a DDS file make sure you choose the right compression format (as above) and always generate MIP maps unless the original texture did not have any (this is rare and usually for textures used in the UI). When opening a DDS file you might be prompted with several options depending on your tool of choice. psd) handy in case you need to make changes, because continuously re-importing and re-saving can degrade the image quality. If working with a texture that needs to be saved in a lossy format make sure you keep your original edited file (such as the. This is generally not noticeable when working with diffuse or specular, but can be especially noticeable with complex tint maps ( example).

Lossy formats are smaller (and friendlier to your graphics card) but can be prone to compression artifacts.

Lossless formats, being uncompressed, have larger file sizes.

This is the format DAI’s tangent space normals are stored in.

It’s 16 bit, as opposed to the more expansive 32 bit A8R8G8B8/8.8.8.8 RGB you might encounter in the wild.

This is a lossless format generally used for DAO tint maps.

DXT5/BC3 should be used for any texture with data in the alpha channel.

DXT1/BC1 format should be used for any texture without an alpha channel.

DXT is NVIDIA compression and BC is Intel compression, but these particular formats are interchangeable.

These are lossy formats that will comprise most of the textures you work with, including diffuse, specular, (non-DAI) normal, and (non-DAO) tint maps.

When modding Dragon Age you’ll only be dealing with a handful of compression formats, these being the most relevant: The DDS format is commonly used for textures in video games. This is because the Intel texture formats used by Frostbite have less widespread support than the older NVIDIA texture formats.

Note that both of the above two programs will struggle with Intel textures exported from Frosty Tool Suite where they won’t with textures exported from DAI Mod Maker or earlier games.

SageThumbs is a free shell extension that allows Windows Explorer to display thumbnails and previews for many otherwise unsupported filetypes such as dds, psd, ai, tga, etc.

Windows Texture Viewer is a free lightweight file viewer, also by NVIDIA, that will open most DDS formats and displays the compression format, dimensions, and mips for easy reference.

It will look something like this: Other Programs of Interest In Photoshop, you can open this pane from the “Window” dropdown in the menu bar. When editing textures you will want to be able to view and switch easily between the different channels.

Dragon age origins retexture