DDS textures

A couple of questions regarding .dds textures.

First of all, as I got there is no importing for .dds files and so Unity won't create meta file for them. I want to change filtering to trilinear, but when I change it, it drops back to bilinear. If there is no way to save this settings, maybe I can change default .dds filtering somewhere (current default is bilinear)?

Second problem is with normal maps. When I try to use .dds normalmap texture, wich looks good in another engine, in Unity in looks wrong. If I convert the first mip level of that .dds texture to .png, all looks fine.

Any thoughts about these two questions? I'm using 3.2 Pro version.

 

For your second problem, Unity converts imported images for normal maps to DXT5nm. Since you're importing a .dds, it assumes it's already in the correct format and doesn't convert it. When you import the .png file, it does convert it properly.

 

My suggestion is to convert every your texture to TGA (in example) so that then Unity will work well.

 

Well it is in correct format, but still it looks wrong in Unity. And different from how it looks in another rendering engines. And i wonder why is it so.

The problem is our artist need to create each mip level manually (in photoshop), so it's not an option. But if there is no way to make Unity use trilinear filtering with .dds, than yes, we'll have to use .tga or .png.

 

Is there a reason why he has to? Are they unique and different looking images per mip? Cause otherwise Unity does them just fine and there's no reason not to let Unity handle them (will save your guys a lot of time too).

 

Yes, he tries to change several smallest mips with the different images, with less details etc. But without trilinear filtering it won't help that much.

 

DDS are not remaining like this in unity its not like it takes the DDS and stores it. It just provides unity a different type of data to store in its own format ...
Unsure if the documentation contains the information on what kind of data actually is left intact

 

Any news regarding the "trilinear filtering" option? I too would like to use a DDS file with some hand-tweaked mipmaps, but Unity doesn't save its filter mode...

 

A-ha, got it! Here's a quick hack to force trilinear filtering on DDS textures:

Code (csharp):

1. using UnityEditor;
2. using UnityEngine;
3.  
4. class DDSForceTrilinear : AssetPostprocessor
5. {
6.     void OnPostprocessTexture(Texture2D texture)
7.     {
8.         if (!assetPath.ToLower().EndsWith(".dds"))
9.             return;
10.        
11.         texture.filterMode = FilterMode.Trilinear;
12.     }
13. }

Just place this script in Assets/Editor.