I'm repainting the default Bonanza and it is coming up with quite a few artifacts. I'd be grateful for any advice from a repaint guru. The bonanza has a simple livery dual colour dds file which consists of a square with two colours (the default red and black). The pattern is dictated not by this small file but by other image files in the texture folder. I should be able to simply change the red and black to two other colours and the pattern will remain the same. It is working fine except there are blotches or artifacts in some areas when I view it in the hanger.

I'm using DXT BMP to load the dds file then load it into paint. There I change the colours then save as a 24 bit file, then reload it in DXT Bmp. I then apply the 1 bit alpha (although I'm not sure this is needed), then save as a DXT1 dds and rename it to the original.

Clearly I am doing something wrong. Is it 1) I am unnecessarily adding the alpha. 2) Saving in the wrong format. 3) Doing something wrong in any of the above process?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

Rob, I'm not sure if this helps but are you saving with the mipmaps option enabled?  Martin Wright's DXTBMP, although a trusty tool for many years, is getting a little long in the tooth these days and for $10 you might also want to try paint.net from the Microsoft store - it can save DDS files in the usual formats and with/without mipmaps, with the added benefit of being a graphic editor with layer support.  Saves the time of converting through DXTBMP.  

As a guess and to answer your other question I believe you may not need the alpha layer.

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by Stoopy

14 minutes ago, Stoopy said:

Rob, I'm not sure if this helps but are you saving with the mipmaps option enabled?  Martin Wright's DXTBMP, although a trusty tool for many years, is getting a little long in the tooth these days and for $10 you might also want to try paint.net from the Microsoft store - it can save DDS files in the usual formats and with/without mipmaps, with the added benefit of being a graphic editor with layer support.  Saves the time of converting through DXTBMP.  

As a guess and to answer your other question I believe you may not need the alpha layer.

Thanks for that. I do actually have paint.net and use it for editing. The file I mentioned has a 1 bit alpha channel but it is not used in any pracitcal sense. I'm guessing that the purpose of DXT BMP is to separate off the alpha channel when editing the image then include it when reloading after the edit. As you say, this is probably all redundant now. I'll have a look at some livery examples and see how others did it. Thanks again.