[REFERENCE] papadump.exe & papatran.exe

I've been having a similar issue to what stuart described in one of his earlier posts where I get the "could not find resource-root setting" error. I have the default.settings file in the same location as papatran and the png texture which I am attempting to convert, so i'm not exactly sure what i'm doing wrong here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT:
Never mind turns out I had the wrong .settings file in my papatran directory.

FYI the current FBX SDK version is 2014.2:

• http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=23298047

Hello, I hope this thread is still active...
I'm working on my first PA mod, which will add new biomes for the system editor. Part of that process requires new textures, which must be converted into a .papa file. After navigating to my tools directory inside PA with cmd prompt, and then executing the following command...
papatran.exe --texture-mode include -o {filename.papa} {europa_tile_diffuse.png}

....it produces this error:
{europa_tile_diffuse.png}: unrecognized extension
1 error

Should I be using a different command?

I don't think Mikeyh is about these days, but I think one of the other experienced moders like @Nicb1 might be able to give you a hand...

I think you took the curly braces too literally. Try

Code:

papatran.exe --texture-mode include -o filename.papa europa_tile_diffuse.png

Thanks for the rapid reply! However, now I get this error:
europa_tile_diffuse.png: could not load: invalid filter
1 error

Fortunately, .pngs CAN be used for my planets. I don't know if there are any adverse effects as such, but at least I can continue work. Here's what I have so-far:

Wow, that looks awesome!

I'm not sure what the invalid filter means. What are the png and default.settings you are using?

The adverse effects of using pngs is that they are about 30 times larger, so that will balloon the size of your mod. Also, the papa files will already be in a graphics card compatible format (DXT5).

Here's my default.settings, and the .png;
resource-root: /pa
srgb-texname-expression: diffuse|skybox
texture-format-alpha: dxt5
texture-format-noalpha: dxt1

Thanks!

I just tried it out. It looks like papatran does not approve of interlaced PNGs. I got the same error as you, so I opened the PNG in Gimp and saved it as a non-interlaced PNG. Then it works. Don't ask me why.

It worked, Thanks!
HOWEVER I still require some assistance... now my textures have pink outlines, like the normal map is 'showing' through,

which is strange considering I'm using unaltered normal maps, straight from game.

In case it's because of my .png save settings here they are:

Any ideas could help...

EDIT:
Nope, was a problem with that particular texture. Loaded it up with gimp, and there that pink outline was. Not sure how corel kept doing it, but switching to gimp seemed to stop it from appearing.

Were you working in cmyk in Corel maybe? Or possibly a non default colour palette?

So I now can create textures and apply them to biomes, and they show up correctly .
CSGs however don't want to play nice. I've tried several times to get them to appear correctly, and with a texture. This is all I can get;

Not sure what's happening, since this is what I 'fed' to papatran;


Any clues?

EDIT:
Here's how I tried getting my model in;
1) build model in Blender
2) UV unwarp
3) apply texture, then export as .fbx
4) use 'papatran.exe --texture-mode reference -o' to convert into .papa
5) set brush to spawn in biome

EDIT #2:
Found this really helpful:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/tutorial-making-custom-csg-and-features.72845/
And got my CSGs working (sort-of), well except for the one I showed here. PA just doesn't like the model for some reason.

Not sure if this will help but in the past I've had to export models using 3ds max rather than Blender. Found that when you export models as FBX in blender it acts up a bit. So you're best off importing it to 3ds max then exporting it using that(The conversion software doesnt seem to like it). Let me know if you're able to give this a shot and if it works out.

If you don't have any of the max software just send me the model in a pm or something and I can try do it for you (Assuming my copy of 3ds is still valid).

If you can run the papa through papadump I can probably spot the issue. My models used to do that a lot until we worked out that you need the second UV channel for CSG.

Unfortunately, I do not have 3DS Max, Although you can try it yourself; I've included my CSG saved inside a zip.

After Here's the papadump output (after I went back and added the second UVlayer and reconverted it):

I’ll have to have a look when I am back at my normal computer. I recognise the problem I just can’t rememebr what I did to fix it

I've moved on to other CSGs in the mean time, and I've had more success, but the shading is glitchy. Once again, I ask if you guys know how to fix this;

That shading looks to me to be due to an odd normal map texture. There are a couple of other things that can mess with shadows, but given the CSG, I think the first thing to check is that your normal map is similar to the normal map from vanilla CSG. It should be mostly blue with touchess of other colour on details.

Thanks, that worked!
I was using transparent pink for the normal map before, as that is what I saw being used by PA's CSGs.
Now I just need to find a way of generating normal maps....

Yeah, if I didn’t have a photoshop licence for other work I would be a bit scuppered on that one. I’m sure other tools must exist though