open IFF texture files?

lancer

I've got an xwing mesh which is from scifi3d

looks good, it's coloured as red 3. I want to alter the textures so I have red 1, 5, 6 etc but can't open the textures because they have iff extensions which I've never come across before.

I've got photoshop but can't open them. I'm also drawing a bit of a blank online to find out how I can open these up, alter and save.

anyone got a suggestion

Martocticvs

You need a plugin: 3D Buzz - photoshop IFF plugin

aszazeroth

On the resource CD that comes with CS2 there is a plugin that let you open .iff files. I't under Photoshop only filters, I think and perhaps in a Alias-something directory. I have the CD's at work so I cannot really check exactly where it's locate, but browse around, copy to your plugin folder, restart PS and you should be able to read and save .iff files

DeadlyDarkness

Failing that, if your 3d program can open it, then map it onto a plane and render an image of it.

Sphynx

lancer wrote: »

...but can't open the textures because they have iff extensions which I've never come across before...

Just for information completeness really: IFF is the Interchangable File Format developed mainly by Commodore to store a whole host of things. A chunk code at the start of the file, and other segments therein, tell the application what is there. An application can therefore load parts of the file that it knows what to do with, and leave others. As (once upon a time) a Commodore platform developer, I've still got the file format knocking around somewhere and I've used variants of it to store data for other things that I've developed.

Most importantly in this case, IFF was the way the Commodore Amiga stored the majority of its images. As Lightwave (and many others, such as Caligari) originated on that platform, it is only natural that there are still a huge number of LW files knocking around that still use IFF.

lancer

super, sorted. thank you. god knows why photoshop doesn't just install it at the beginning anyway.

Coolhand

Sphynx wrote: »

Just for information completeness really: IFF is the Interchangable File Format developed mainly by Commodore to store a whole host of things. A chunk code at the start of the file, and other segments therein, tell the application what is there. An application can therefore load parts of the file that it knows what to do with, and leave others. As (once upon a time) a Commodore platform developer, I've still got the file format knocking around somewhere and I've used variants of it to store data for other things that I've developed.

Most importantly in this case, IFF was the way the Commodore Amiga stored the majority of its images. As Lightwave (and many others, such as Caligari) originated on that platform, it is only natural that there are still a huge number of LW files knocking around that still use IFF.

Holy crap, i haven't used IFF's since about '95 when my 1200 (with 2mb of ram and a 200mb HDD!) finally packed up... i've still got disks full of IFF pics from imagine and deluxe paint that i'll probably never see again (no great loss, probably...) what stuff did you work on for the Amiga?

mattc

Actually, IFF was developed by Electronic Arts in 1985 and adopted by Commodore as a standard.

LW for instance, still stores it's objects in an IFF compliant format (aka LWO2).

IN this case, it's probably an IFF ILBM (interleaved bitmap) which, btw, are stil the best images to use as textures in LW since it handles them natively.

M

gmd3d

useful information .

not to hijack the thread . But what is the best format for a texture in a Lightwave mesh.. ?? jpg . bitmap or ???????? to give the best results ..

need this for my Galactica Landing bay deck ..

Sphynx

@Coolhand: Nothing that you'd know. Mostly 'business' stuff that I was sidelining towards the last days of my time in the Civil Service. For commercial reasons, I dropped it when I left to concentrate on the PC for my first comapny.

@Mattc: Commodore paid EA for the development work. The specification and history thereof is documented in the developer manuals.

@Taranis: IFF was always the historic standard, but that was mainly because of its origins. Targa was also very big for LW because of its lossless format etc. but really its all down to your individiual needs for the mesh that you are doing - whatever LW now supports, essentially, that you feel comfortable with. Though naturally, if you are going rely on a good bump map texture, I'd stay away from lossy formats like lower quality JPG files. 100% JPG is usually OK, unless you really need high quality.

mattc

Sphynx wrote: »

@Taranis: IFF was always the historic standard, but that was mainly because of its origins. Targa was also very big for LW because of its lossless format etc. but really its all down to your individiual needs for the mesh that you are doing - whatever LW now supports, essentially, that you feel comfortable with. Though naturally, if you are going rely on a good bump map texture, I'd stay away from lossy formats like lower quality JPG files. 100% JPG is usually OK, unless you really need high quality.

LW still supports IFF ILBM and TGA native sans loader/save plugins. 8 bit IFF's are especially effective in cutting memory overhead at render time.

EDIT: For those interested, here's the original EA documentation for the format.

http://www.coco3.com/text/doc_ilbm.txt

M.

Coolhand

Sphynx wrote: »

I dropped it when I left to concentrate on the PC for my first comapny.

A wise move.

DeadlyDarkness

For Max, I usually use .psd files until I'm finished, then convert them to 24/32 bit targa files. Sometimes I compress them RLE, since its lossless.

gmd3d

thanks .. that very informative . I will be posting a sample picture in the landing bay thread .. if you can have a look and give some advice I really appreciate it .

[Deleted User]

@Taranis: One issue of note is that images with compression schemes (lossy or lossless) require extra processor time and memory for the image to be used as a map. If you are using just a few that's no big deal, but in big scenes with many compressed images there can be a lot of pre-render time devoted to unpacking them.

Uncompressed images, on the other hand, are ready to go. Of course they will take up more disk space.