Ue4 fail to properly export texture.

The full error message is:

“TextureName”: Texture is RGBA16 and cannot be represented at such high bit depth in .tga. Color will be scaled to RGBA8.

This ruins the normalmap making it pink. How to solve this ?

Related

This affects several market place assets.

Related PIE error
Warning T_Pillar_Small_Base_M: Texture is RGBA16 and cannot be represented at such high bit depth in .tga. Color will be scaled to RGBA8.

Is there any workaround for this? As mentioned by unit23, this is a problem for several marketplace assets since I can’t export their textures to edit them.

I might be wrong, but I think this export limitation is mainly an issue because people want to use or edit textures in another application. Migrating unfortunately won’t help with that.

I think the only way to work around this to setup the source project for a migrate instead.

The export functionality is clearly lacking, but the migrate is just a one-to-one transfer from one project to another as long as everything is setup correctly with the folder structure.

Hope that helps!

No you’re right actually I didn’t think of that. Migration doesn’t help with that use case.

So I guess back to the original problem. I don’t know anything about file formats and writing an exporter but surely it’s not that hard/time consuming for Epic to implement a .png export pipeline right?

Hey guys, So I discovered a work around of sorts for this issue. When you export the texture, it gives you the warning but it still outputs a TGA file for you. If you open the file in Photoshop (or whatever image editor) you’ll see that it looks wrong. What’s happening (at least in my case) is that it has inverted the color channels. So Green is fine but Red and Blue were flipped. You can fix this easily enough by copy and pasting the channels to their correct spot in a new document. So the Red channel is actually the Blue and the Blue channel is actually the Red.

Here’s a screenshot of my normal map that was exported. The left is how it looked when I opened it up after getting the warning message and the right is after I swapped the Red and Blue channels.

if that’s the case it would be a really easy fix ! thank you !! i’ll try it when I’m in work next. What version of UE were you using ?

and yet here I am months later trying to do it myself. i found some inspiration here tho:
(around line 4560) VictoryPlugin/VictoryBPFunctionLibrary.cpp at master · EverNewJoy/VictoryPlugin · GitHub

Still an issue in 4.19.2

Apparently this is also an issue with Diffuse Textures from these Switchboard packs

If you export images the Red Texture Channel is Flipped.
If you resize the images the results is a destroyed Texture.

Related error:
Texture is RGBA16 and cannot be represented at such high bit depth in .tga. Color will be scaled to RGBA8.

To fix circumvent any texture issues, the Bake out Materials option inside the SMesh panel generates textures which are completely compatible and optimized.

Work around: How to Export Substance Designer Textures From Unreal Engine 4.20 - YouTube

Doesnt seem to work, it bakes out half the texture then the rest is smeared. Still a dumb bug that makes me wonder what the hell Epic engineers are doing

Thank you!

Hi, its correct, the red and blue are switched. The way to fix it in GIMP is the following:

  1. Open the image which you see in wrong color
  2. Use Colors → Components → Decompose (this will create a new image, with the 3 channels are layers instead of channels, so you can manipulate those)
  3. Duplicate the blue layer into a new layer
  4. select the red layer , select all and copy
  5. now select the blue layer, and paste the red one you copied, click on the ANCHOR to avoid making a new layer, or it will not work
  6. now select the duplicate blue and copy its content into the red one
  7. delete the blue copy layer
  8. Use Colors → Components → Recompose , this will modify the original image

You cannot change layers, but you need to paste anchor on them. Good luck.

Some years ago now, I export a texture and still get the error:
“Texture is RGBA16 and cannot be represented at such high bit depth in .tga. Color will be scaled to RGBA8.”

Can someone explain why this problem even exists? It sounds not so complicated to export an image.

Follow up to the solution of Talad for Gimp to switch blue and red color:
Instead of switching around the colors by copy and paste, you can go simply to Colors > Components > Channel Mixer

  • And switch there in Red Channel, the Blue Channel to 1 and the Red Channel to 0
  • And in Blue Channel, the Red Channel to 1 and the Blue Channel to 0

That’s much faster in Gimp