DDS is calling you

Hello world!

Some words about DDS-Files, graphic tools and a small subproject I’m working on.

Most of you know me as the lead texture guy at CTDP, for the last few years I worked mostly on textures and put my spin on the style and artworks. More recently I moved my field of work, as the current mod is nearly done.
The rFactor textures are saved in Microsofts DirectDrawSurface format. There are plugins for several graphics tools for this format, but often I found them a bit enerving as they either had too much settings you never required or were disrupting the workflow, slow or all of this. Exporting textures to DDS can be annoying, because the settings just overwhelm you, you easily set it up the wrong way and have to save again. You have several textures, you want to scale all of them, every texture pops you a window asking for the settings. It’s a bit unhandy, annoying.

About half a year ago, I got hand on some DDS-Loading and DXT-Compression-classes for building my own programms, loading and writing DDS-files. Took some time to get into it, get the files decompressed and compressed again, but I’m at a point, where I have a working Java-library for DDS-management and I’m working on some programs for doing some specific stuff (Rescaling for instance.)

Now, I’m calling for other textures artists and maybe even for other Java-Developers, who might be interested in the stuff I’m working on.
At the texture artists, I’d like to hear if you also have some ideas, some things you find annoying when handling with DDS-files. I can’t cure cancer or develop a complete new Photoshop, but I’d like to hear your ideas and rants.

At the developers, I am one of two programmers at CTDP. Daniel mostly works in Delphi, although he does occasionally look at my code. I wouldn’t mind a new pair of eyes, who’d be interested in the topic and could give me feedback on code style, performance, good practice and my implementations.

I can’t say what will come out of my little project. For me it’s a nice practice working towards my Bachelor thesis, so I don’t know, if I will release my programms and libraries later. At the moment I think they aren’t as clean as they’d have to be.

So if you are intersted contact me via email: dahie .at. ctdpworld.org or jabber: dahie@mabber.de

Published by

(CTDP)Dahie

Textures supervisor, Webdesign, Programming

3 thoughts on “DDS is calling you”

  1. Hello,

    this sound great and it is very interesting to see the results of your work. As I am not able to help you with your work I only have an idea or a wish for a tool. It would be great to have a converter that converts DDS files into the “Cinema 4D” file format (c4d) so that it would be possible to render the cars within Cinema 4D for presentation.

    Maybe you are able to create such a converter?

    Regards,
    Franklin

  2. @ Franklin: you can open the dds files in photoshop for example, there’s a plugin for that. for a 3d-presentation in cinema you need an extract-program like mas-studio for rfactor-3dmodels.

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