BMPcrop problems.....alternatives?

[SdC]

To chop up a large background map into 256x256 I've been using Martin's BMPCrop. The resulting bitmaps seem to have a corrupt header or palette and cannot be loaded by the sim and by Imagetool. This can be fixed by opening them in Photoshop and re-saving them as bmp, but for large projects this is waaaaay too time-consuming.
Also, any Alpha channel in the bitmap is lost.
Are there better tools out there to chop up large images? Preferably that chop up a DXT1+alpha and/or 8-bit+alpha.

[stiz]

i dont know of any, just do it the old way and save the alpha resize the bitmaps (inlc. alpha) and then put em together again........:isadizzy:

[SdC]

Thanks but this takes an incredible amount of clicking for 170+ bitmaps, this is exactly what I'm, trying to avoid in the future....

[Martin]

BmpCrop is designed for "normal" 8 bit or 24 bit bmps so if you are trying to slice anything else you will get wierd results.

What format is your original bmp in?

[SdC]

Hi Martin, I've used both "regular" 24bit and 8bit. Both resulted in corrupt BMP output.

Meanwhile, I've found other software to split BMP's here http://www.thecastle.com/software.html which works good.

Ultimately though I'd like to be able to do a straight conversion from 2 large master bitmaps (1 normal and 1 alpha) or a single DXT w/alpha and have cropped output files with included alpha (either DXT or 8 bit; I can batch-process DTX's with Imagetool to create the 8 bit textures)
It's such a pain to have to load each individual small bitmap into dxtbmp to import the alpha and then have to save.....over and over again....
it makes it very difficult to make small modifications to the master and then re-generate the small textures...

[Martin]

If you paint all your alpha areas in black before slicing the main image you can use my ConvIm to batch-convert the resulting bmps to DXT1. This will translate the black areas as alpha-transparency and do pretty much what you are looking for.

I can`t guess why BmpCrop is giving what seem to be invalid bmps. In fact if Photoshop can load them then they would seem to be pretty normal. I have done similar things in the past (slicing up large ground images to create multiple 256x256 tiles) and have had no problems. It has been a while though....

[SdC]

Ok thanks Martin, I'll give it a try! :guinness:

[SdC]

If you paint all your alpha areas in black before slicing the main image you can use my ConvIm to batch-convert the resulting bmps to DXT1. This will translate the black areas as alpha-transparency and do pretty much what you are looking for.

I can`t guess why BmpCrop is giving what seem to be invalid bmps. In fact if Photoshop can load them then they would seem to be pretty normal. I have done similar things in the past (slicing up large ground images to create multiple 256x256 tiles) and have had no problems. It has been a while though....

Still no luck on this
In my manual procedure (dxtbmp->import alpha->save as dxt1+alpha->imagetool->convert to 8bit), I can use separate Alpha bitmaps, and in the resulting 8bit bitmap, the alpha is indexed (subtle blending instead of on/off) and gives the best result.
Ideally, I'd like to have a command line utility that imports the alphamask and saves the result as extended bitmap, like:
dxtbmp.exe test.bmp -alpha test_alpha.bmp -dxt3
This would also be very useful for scripting the conversion of fs9 objects to cfs2.