TGA rendering

[Dicoguy]

If I render a poster as a vtf file, what are the advantages? I know you can open it up in GIMP, but will it still retain the quality of a PNG rendered poster? What are the other advantages to rendering as a tga?

[Zappy]

Advantages: Works in the Source engine (but why'd you even want to use a poster in Source in the first place, and if you do, why not just manually convert it to VTF?).

Disadvantages: Stretched/squished image (as the width/height can only be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etcetera), lower quality compared to PNG (due to compression), and most image editors don't support it (some do, but only with plug-ins).

[Pte Jack]

I did not know that vtf was a render option... (???) If it is, Idon't have it and an export option! (lol)

[Dicoguy]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

I did not know that vtf was a render option... (???) If it is, Idon't have it and an export option! (lol)

i mean it is the defualt render option...

[bryce tankthrust]

Originally posted by Dicoguy:

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

I did not know that vtf was a render option... (???) If it is, Idon't have it and an export option! (lol)

i mean it is the defualt render option...

wat? no it's not. The render options (if we're discussing posters) are .tga, png, and jpg.

[Dicoguy]

Originally posted by its free real estate:

Originally posted by Dicoguy:

i mean it is the defualt render option...

wat? no it's not. The render options (if we're discussing posters) are .tga, png, and jpg.

ahh nuts I meant tga, my bad

[bryce tankthrust]

Originally posted by Dicoguy:

Originally posted by its free real estate:

wat? no it's not. The render options (if we're discussing posters) are .tga, png, and jpg.

ahh nuts I meant tga, my bad

._.

[Marco Skoll]

They're both lossless formats, so in terms of quality, there's no difference. The main thing to consider is that PNG tends to be supported by more programs.

There's a lot of technical differences in terms of how their compressions are optimised and what might have the smaller filesize if you want to compress a photo, or if you wanted to get the best performance out of a game texture... but that explanation would be a lot of jargon I don't entirely understand myself.

In the great scheme of things though, SFM's poster export seems to export uncompressed TGAs and PNGs, which makes for unnecessarily large file sizes.

I had a lot of them from back from when I actually made the mistake of using poster exports (buggy nasty mis-rendered things that they are) and I eventually ended up feeding them to a Photoshop batch process to compress the formats. (Which got me back a considerable number of gigabytes on my hard disk).