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VTF Lossless Tools

Command-line tools for manipulating VTF (Valve Texture Format) textures losslessly. These utilities allow to quickly perform and automate various tedious tasks that typically require re-creating (and re-encoding) textures from scratch, potentially loosing image quality.

Download the latest release.

Some of the tools mentioned below can be used to alter DXT-compressed texture image data directly. The catch is that they allow to modify DXT1 and DXT5 encoded VTF textures losslessly: that is, without re-encoding them again in DXT format and further reducing image quality.

  • vtfsplit: separate animated VTF texture into individual frame files.
  • vtfmerge: merge the individual VTF frames back into animated VTF texture.
  • vtfpatch1: copy a rectangular portion of DXT data from source VTF into the destination VTF. Both color channel and alpha channel can be copied together. Only the largest mipmap is affected.
  • vtfcopyalpha1: copy the entire alpha channel from source VTF into the destination VTF (all mipmaps).
  • vtfzapalpha1: discard the alpha channel. Can be used to remove unnecessary (empty) or no longer needed alpha channel and reduce VTF size.
  • vtfzapmain: discard the largest mipmap (halves the texture dimensions).
  • vtfzapmips: discard all but the largest mipmap (no LOD).
  • vtfzapthumb: discard the VTF thumbnail mini-texture.
  • vtfzapreflectivity: reset the VTF reflectivity values.
  • vtfgenmips: re-create the entire set of mipmaps from the current mipmap (which is largest).
  • vtfgenthumb: re-generate the VTF thumbnail.
  • vtfflags: alter (add / remove / toggle) VTF flags.
  • vtf72: convert the VTF to version 7.2 format.

Invoke each tool without command-line arguments for usage instructions.

Note that using any of these tools will convert the VTF to version 7.2 format. This is required to remove the potential CRC checksum attached to VTF after VTF image data has been changed. So if you use any of 7.3+ VTF features, like resources for UV LOD settings or CRC, for example, you would have to re-save the modified VTF texture with these features re-added using the appropriate tool.

How to Use

Download VTFEdit which contains the required DLLs. Extract the downloaded vtftools package into the appropriate VTFEdit architecture subfolder and invoke all utilities from there.

How to Build

Download VTFLib which contains the required libraries. Extract the lib folder into the vtftools source folder and run the correct .bat file to build VTF tools of appropriate architecture. Do not extract the VTFLib folder, – VTF tools use the slightly modified version of VTFLib source code to assist its building process.

Using vtfpatch

The best workflow is to use Adobe Photoshop to manually edit the texture, apply the DXT compression fix, and re-export it in VTF format with all mipmaps. Then, use vtfpatch over the entire texture dimensions (e.g. 0,0,1023,1023) to restore the original largest mipmap from the unmodified VTF. Finally, use vtfpatch again to copy over only the patched region you originally were intending to “patch” in the largest mipmap. This takes quite a bit of time, but gives the best result.

The much faster alternative is to use vtfpatch right away, and then simply vtfzapmips followed by vtfgenmips to re-generate mipmaps with patch included. However, the generated mipmaps wouldn’t carry the DXT color compression fix and would have their colors slightly off.

⭐ Support

Making quality software is hard and time-consuming. If you find VTF tools useful, you can buy me a ☕!

Footnotes

  1. tools that work only with DXT-compressed VTF textures. ↩ ↩2 ↩3