DDS Photo | Gimp Auto remap Mipmaps

Question

I'm trying to edit CoD4 guns to add a diff texture, however... no matter what program I use the DDS auto remaps the MIPS so instead of importing normally as texture should for mapping it actually imports as the gun would look like in the game

This is an example of how one should like as a character mapping but the same concept for a gun that is a template for Dead Pool just only example I could find but you see how it's not altogether, it's split up. I need something similar for the gun to edit it properly - it needs to be split up based on the geometry.

Any help with this would be really great. I've tried Photoshop, Gimp and even online services - all come out the same.

Answer 1

This is not a problem with your image editing software. You cannot change this result by importing this file any differently or using different software.

You've simply opened the wrong texture file.

Games will often contain many different textures relating to a weapon, including a diffuse/albedo texture, a normal map, various combinations of smoothness/metalness/occlusion/etc. maps... and an icon used to display the weapon in the HUD or menus.

You have opened the icon texture here, not a texture that is used when rendering the material on the 3D model.

A DDS file is just an image file - it does not contain any of the geometry information that would be needed to "fold up" the texture into the shape of the gun. So the only way to get a 2D side view of the full gun surrounded by transparency when you open a DDS file is if that's all the DDS file contained in the first place.

Search for a different texture file related to this weapon to get the source material texture you're looking for.