Celestia Forums

How can i convert jpeg, png to dds and "viceversa"?

First you need to convert the .jpg or .png to a .tga using a good image editor. Than you need to download nvdxt.exe from NVidia. Its a command line program, meaning of course there is no user interface. After you have it downloaded check through the forum here under nvdxt.exe for further instructions. Here is the line that you will need to enter into the RUN application under your Star Menu. x:\nvdxt.exe -file x:\myimage.tga -dxt5 where the x is the drive where you have nvdxt.exe located and the the other x is the drive where the image you want to convert is located. You will need to keep the size of your images (.tga) files below the 8192x4096 size if you don't at have at least 768megs of ram. If you have a 1gig of ram than you can go ahead and try 16384x8192. But be warned the large the file the longer it will take to convert into a .dds. And don't bother making a .dds file with a size over 16384x8192 because Celestia can't use it and it would be to big for even the fastest video cards even with 128megs of ram. Good Luck.

Don, can you provide the link to download the file "nvdxt.exe"?. I went to the Nvidia site but can't find it. Thanks.

Go to Celestial Visions and click the link that says User Downloads...In the folder marked DXT_TOOLS you will find all the tools and documentation you need in the dxt_tools.zip or you can grab what you need in the folder marked command line...in there is nvdxt.exe

nvdxt is also available from Nvidia's Developers Web site.
The link to it is about halfway down the page
http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=ps_texture_compression_plugin
in the section titled "Attachments".

It's slightly annoying: the links to their downloads look like they're just plain black text, unlike other links on that page which are blue. The link to nvdxt is the line that says
v5.19 DXT Compression Tools (1433 KB)

thanks!

Don: I'm getting confused here. You described the command line to convert a tga file to dds using nvdxt.exe, but I don't seem to translate it.
Specifically, lets say that I have the file "EAST.TGA" and "NVDXT.EXE" in the "c:\images" directory and I want to call the converted file "EAST.DDS" located in the same directory, then what would be exactly the command?
Thanks.