What is this?

Keeps an eye on a folder, and when any image gets modified, it makes or updates the VTF with the same name

• Supported image formats: PNG, BMP, TGA, JPG, JPEG, PSD

Select a materials folder and press "Start"

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Quick editing thanks to Hammer++'s hotloading ability:

VTF image format and flags persist when image is updated!

(it works this way when any supported image file is updated, this is just an example of photoshop updating a .psd file)

Important

Photoshop notice:

Alpha channel won't be recognized if you have only 1 layer locked like this:


Due to Adobe's closed-source nature, new Photoshop versions have features which are unsupported, and may cause differences in exporting. It's advisable to use an older version like Photoshop CS6

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Drag-n-Dropping allows for a bunch of manual conversions:

• Dragging a VTF:

  • Allows exporting to PNG, TGA or PSD
  • Make Simple VMT with LightmappedGeneric shader and $basetexture pointing to VTF, relative to materials/

• Dragging an image:

  • Lossless Makes VTF with BGRA8888 compression if image is transparent, or RGB888 if opaque
  • Compressed Makes VTF with DXT5 compression if image is transparent, or DXT1 if opaque
  • These presets are set to version 7.1 and mipmap generation is enabled with HANNING filtering

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The Advanced option shows a panel similar to VTFEdit:

I think that only these 6 flags have an actual impact. If I missed an useful flag let me know.

Same with the image formats that this program accepts:

• BGRA8888
• RGB888
• IA88
• I8
• DXT5
• DXT1
• RGB565 (todo: is this format supported in any branch of the source engine?)

Details

• Updates VTF files while preserving the settings (flags, image format, version).

  • If the VTF has no mipmaps, the updated VTF will also not have mipmaps. If it has, the updated VTF will have mipmaps with the HANNING filtering.
  • The image format of the updated VTF can alternate between having alpha or not having alpha, depending on whether the input image has any transparent pixels or it's fully opaque. For example, a VTF with I8 image format will become IA88 if the updated content has any transparency, and will go back to I8 if it's updated with a fully opaque content. And the same for the other format pairs (DXT5/DXT1, BGRA8888/RGB888, IA88/I8) and the special case pair: (BGRA8888/RGB565) because there is no equivalent of RGB565 with alpha. If the program tries to update a VTF which has any other image format, the updated VTF will default to having an image format of BGRA8888 (lossless with alpha).

• Images can be any size, they are automatically resized to the nearest power of two

Todo

• Can't make animated textures or envmaps yet
• I couldn't find a way to support Gimp's native XCF file format
• Currently the program can't be notified if VTFCmd fails for some reason, so it just silently fails

External dependencies information

Requires .NET 8.0

VTFCmd is compiled from >>> here

How to compile VTFCmd: (or at least how I managed to compile it)

• Open sln\vs2019\VTFLib.sln solution with Visual Studio 2022

• Accept updating the projects

• Set Startup project to VTFCmd

• Inside VTFCmd\VTFCmd.rc replace #include "afxres.h" with #include<windows.h>

• Build for Release 64bit

• Output will be in sln\vs2019\VTFCmd\x64\Release\

  • in the AutoVTF build folder, make a new folder called vtfcmd. Copy VTFCmd.exe and VTFLib.dll there

• VTFCmd requires DevIL, which can be found >>> here

  • Put DevIL.dll, ILU.dll, ILUT.dll in the vtfcmd folder

NuGet packages:

• Magick.NET
• DarkUI

Misc

I hope that this will be useful to people, because it has already made my workflow so much simpler than before.

This isn't meant to be a replacement for VTFEdit though, it's still very useful for previewing VTFs and setting some arcane settings.

If you found a bug or have a suggestion you can create an issue

Program is often falsely detected as virus

If you want to be sure that there is nothing malicious, take a look at the source code and compile it, and download/compile the external dependencies yourself.