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DTS Materials

Sun, 01/11/2009 - 17:05 — Joseph Greenawalt

What's supported

  • UV mapped textures
  • Translucent DTS Materials
  • Translucent Additive DTS Materials
  • Translucent Subtractive DTS Materials
  • Self Illuminating DTS Materials
  • SWrap and TWrap flags that control UV/Image wrapping
  • IFL Materials
  • Detail Maps
  • Environment mapping with configurable "reflectivity"
  • Reflectance Maps (only partially implemented in stock TGE)
  • TGE "Bump" Maps (Not implemented in stock TGE)
  • Automatic generation of TGEA material scripts based on the TGE material settings (optional)

Any UV image texture may be mapped to any face on any Blender mesh object.  Only one main (diffuse) texture may be mapped to any given face at a time.

There's no practical limit to the number of textures/materials that can be exported, although in-game performance may (read: will) suffer if too many are used. Textures must be in the same folder as the .dts, or in a parent folder of the folder containing the dts file, otherwise they won't show up in-game; images are not stored internally or embedded inside a .dts file. All textures must be power of two sized, and must be saved in a supported format. Currently supported formats for TGE 1.5.2 are:

  • jpeg
  • png

Currently supported formats for TGEA verison 1.7 are:

  • jpeg
  • png
  • dds

Non-power-of-2 sized textures are not supported by most DirectX and OpenGL graphics hardware (and by extension, Torque).

What is a "Power of two" sized image?

An image can be said to be "power of two" sized if both dimensions of the image (horizontal and vertical) in pixels are power of two sized numbers.  Here are some examples of "power of two" numbers:

2^2 (two to the power of two) = 2 * 2 = 4
2^3 (two to the power of three) = 2 * 2 * 2 = 8
2^4 (two to the power of four) = 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 16
2^5 = 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 32
2^6 ... = 64
2^7 ... = 128
2^8 ... = 256
2^9 ... = 512
2^10 ... = 1024
2^11 ... = 2048
2^12 ... = 4096

Any two of these numbers may be used for the image x and y (horizontal and vertical) dimensions in pixels.  Images do not have to be square.  Here are some examples of valid image dimensions:

  • 16x16
  • 16x32
  • 64x64
  • 128x64
  • 128x32
  • 256x512
  • 512x512
  • 512x1024
  • 1024x1024
  • 1024x512
  • etc.

Defining DTS materials

Blender materials are not used to define dts materials.  DTS Materials are defined using UV/Mapped image textures in Blender.  The exporter scans through all of the meshes in the export hierarchy and finds all UV/Images that are mapped to any faces.  The images that are found show up as DTS Materials in the Materials panel of the exporter GUI.  Options for each DTS material can be found in the Materials tab of the exporter GUI.

See Also: