Help!!! FSX texture woes

[Bliggup]

Hello all...

I'm in real need of help with a project I'm working on for FSX stock f-18 textures. I'm adding font work to the texture for VFA-131 CAG, a blue text with a red drop shadow. Everything looks fine in photoshop until I save it as a DDS (DXT5) file and then the textures blur together, resulting in a horrible drop shadow effect. I've even tried saving it as a BMP and then using DXTBmp to save it as a DDS, nothing works. I've tried every different anti-alaising type, I've even tried using the blending options to add a drop shadow and still the same result.

If anyone could help me I would be very grateful. I've been trying to figure this out for a while now and I'm lost. Thank you

[Supah]

Didn't they have something called mipmaps in FSX that caused stuff like this? Is the texture sharp and clear when you open it?

[Bliggup]

I've turned off mipmaps because they do cause this problem. The texture file is nice n sharp before I save it to a DDS and then it get blurry. The thing I can't figure out is that the fonts are the only thing that really gets effected by this, none of the other colors run together, just the fonts. I'm stumped

[adlabs6]

The DDS formats are compressed image formats as far as I'm aware. Have you tried DXT3 format instead of DXT5?

You might want to try to save the files in 32 bit format to prevent image compression. When doing this, I don't think that using DXTBmp is even necessary, though the files can be huge and slow to load depending on your computer.

Try both DXT3 and full 32 bit formats, and see if your results improve.

PS... Post moved to FS forum for better exposure.

[Bliggup]

Yeah I've tried DXT3 and 32 bit formats as well, still the same result. The really odd thing is that I created some textures for the VRS superbug using the same size and type font with the same drop shadow and the results were great. I'm not sure what's going on, but this stock F18 is killing me....

However, I do appreciate you guys taking the time to reply with suggestions. This is the first time I've run in to this particular problem and I'm getting quite irritated. I'm sure if I find a fix it will be here.

[e-b-o-]

These are *.dds compression artifacts, they have nothing to do with mipmaps...

I'd try different exporters, for example the nvidia photoshop plugin gives you pretty good results on dxt exportings.

You could also use Crazybump for exporting (you can choose a setting like R8G8B8, which is almost uncompressed...), but I don't know if FSX will support this compression setting... I guess it's trial and error then.