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I'm testing Affinity Designer for the first time and I really like the ease of making complex shapes. I've never been much into Illustrator before, so Affinity is just what I need!

 

I'm looking at the list of export formats and I couldn't find TGA. Don't know whether to think that's strange or not, but for game engines, TGA seem to be used more than I knew before.

 

At the game design school I graduated from, we were encouraged to use TGA for UI elements. I thought that was strange to begin with, but I stuck to it.

 

Now I'm modding a game, and the game wants TGA. It becomes a bit of a hassle to export to something else first and then convert to TGA.

 

Is TGA of any interest for you to support ? I know I'd be super happy, and could make faster iterations with the automated export. Simply make a change in a slice, it exports on the fly, go into Unreal Engine and refresh the asset - bang! Done!

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  • Staff
OlaHaldor,

 

Welcome to the Serif affinity forums :)

 

Thanks for your suggestion. What application needs TGA format to create games please?

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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It's not so much about need for Unreal Engine, but we used that all the time. Basically, it was the file format that gave us the least trouble. PNG could have some trouble with color space or alpha, while TGA was rock solid all the way through.

 

Right now I am making some mods for a game called Transport Fever (think the 90's classic Transport Tycoon in 3D), and it supports both DDS and TGA, where DDS is used for textures of 3D objects and TGA is used for the UI.

If I could shave a step (and in time, perhaps even cancel the Photoshop subscription) by exporting directly to TGA (with alpha channel) that would be a huge time saver.

 

I get it if I'm like the only one, you won't look into it, so I hope more people may wish for TGA export. :)

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Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Hi,

 

Currently I'm testing Affinity Photo Beta and...

 

 

 

I get it if I'm like the only one, you won't look into it, so I hope more people may wish for TGA export. :)

 

Well, you are not the only one wanting .tga export! :)

 

Just to add some information. Unreal Engine does support .png however if there is any non opaque area in there, that section will become very distorted. I do believe it's a bug but I did track some posts from 2014 regarding this problem so I doubt we will see a fix for this anytime soon.

Say, for example, you export a color map + roughness map (this last one using the alpha channel). The color map will be completely unusable.

Searching the forums, they suggest to use .tga or .psd.

I tried exporting to .psd and the result was terrible (everything completely blurred and the "transparent" areas were missing)

 

Anyway, thanks for all the attention and for this amazing application! :)

 

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  • 1 month later...

The problem stems from the png format not storing an alpha channel, it only stores transparency. This means that if an area of the image is 100% transparent, then the png format is free to not store any information about the colour of those pixels. This can cause problems for game textures for a number of reasons. For example, the alpha channel is often used to store information other than transparency (specular hardness for example, or any other useful information). It can also be a problem when creating mip-maps for textures (scaled-down prefiltered versions of the texture), as it can cause nasty halos around the edges of sprites.

 

The tga format stores an explicit alpha channel, so it doesn't have this problem (it is also extremely simple to implement, which is another reason game developers like it).

 

So on behalf of game developers everywhere: please add support for exporting to tga!

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  • 5 months later...

Hello,

 

I'm evaluating Affinity Photo and really liking it so far. I work in games and wanted to second the request to be able to export images in TGA format. TGA is pretty much standard for game textures and it would be great to be able to use it!

 

Thanks!

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We've been using Unity for a few years now. Like has been stated in different ways here, in games, textures are used in many different ways. Alpha isn't always used as alpha. The RGB channels of a texture can be sampled and used in a myriad of ways in a game shader. Good channel editing is vitally important--which is something Photoshop handles effortlessly. 

 

I briefly experimented with Affinity Photo and I was a little underwhelmed by its channel editing. But this is from someone that has only used it briefly. I am seriously trying to decide if ditching Photoshop entirely is in the realm of possibilities. There are several really helpful pieces of software that have shown up recently for game development--in particular Substance Painter. 

 

I believe a work around for .tga (at least for Unity) is to use the PSD format. But I need to do some experiments to see if the alpha is exported properly out of Affinity Photo--because .psd can have more than one alpha channel--which is not supported by game engines. And its a little hazy how well this will work. 

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  • 8 months later...

I also support this request TGA is the industry standard Export format not having TGA , gives both Designer and Photo a massive blow, im working with hologram UI in my game in unreal and PNG has issues with the alpha/opacity. I literally have to use Photoshop because it has TGA

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  • 1 month later...
  • 5 weeks later...

Hi, new here.

Also work in game development and am trying to switch to Affinity from photoshop on my personal PC at home, however lack of TGA support is criminal! Please look into support for TGA. :) I would almost be ok with .TIFF format if Unreal engine supported that. :/ 

 

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If I could direct a question to the staff, what is keeping Affinity Photo from saving to Targa? It's a widely used format in games. The closest thing is a PNG but in photoshop, that has issues with transparency and colour bleeding since you can't edit an alpha channel directly with a png. With Targas people are able to retain the colour of the image and edit the alpha channel instead. This may be a photoshop issue but the fact remains that TGA is now most popular in game development. It can't possibly take that long in development time to add such a simple feature for an application that's only real job is to open, edit/create and save images. I'm just curious as to why such a simple and very much needed feature is being pushed aside as I've seen for a few years now that people have been asking for tga support.

I have experience in most applications for game development including game engines, however my current workflow uses Substance Designer/Painter, Photoshop, Zbrush, Maya and Unity/Unreal. The only formats that I ever use is .obj and .fbx for 3D, PSD and Targa for 2D. Occasionally png for 16 bit support (heightmaps mostly). I've worked in 3 different studios over my near 7 year career and I can confirm so far that everywhere I've worked use Targa as the main texture image format.

So foolish me for buying Affinity Photo without first checking for this feature, but I really would like to switch from Photoshop to Affinity on my home pc because I cannot justify spending money every month for photoshop when all I need is the ability to open/edit and save textures.

This isn't a rant by any means, I would just really love to see TGA support asap. :P

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Asap is the trendy word, lately....

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
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Hmm... I bought and paid for Infinity (so happy to get off Photoshop) and to find that TGA export is not supported is a bit of a shock. Also for game use.

 

Should I be concerned? No reply from the developer at all on this issue.. which as been raised and commented on repeatedly since 2016..

 

Did I make a mistake buying this product - does the developer actually respond to the forum ?

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I honestly never use Photo because I can't use it with game engines. It's as simple as that. I feel betrayed, as I can't even think of any other alternative that does not export TGA, yet the features and the price point for Photo was what lured me in.

 

Devs, @Patrick Connor   ; you really need to take this seriously. Besides, students and indies would most likely seriously consider Photo if it could be used for their game productions since the price is very competitive!

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7 hours ago, Stuart Mackereth said:

and paid for Infinity

 

Hello @Stuart Mackereth,

 

first off, welcome to the forum.

 

I am sorry if I may sound a bit snobbish but you paid for Affinity not Infintiy ;)

 

 

7 hours ago, Stuart Mackereth said:

No reply from the developer at all on this issue.. which as been raised and commented on repeatedly since 2016..

 

Developors and other employees at Serif do monitor this forum which is named 'Feature requests, Suggestions and Feedback'. It has been stated several times that they do not reply on purpous. They just monitor.

 

 

7 hours ago, Stuart Mackereth said:

does the developer actually respond to the forum ?

 

 

Yes, they do.

As an example look at this post:
Sneak peeks for 1.7 by Ben, a core developer.

 

Cheers,

d.

 

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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  • 4 months later...

I would want to add my vote to this thread, if I may.
Besides the use in 3D games and offline rendering, too, for example I am right now trying to make a skin for WindowBlinds, turns out the Windows internal images are all .tgas and .bmps, both file types Affinity unforunately does not support... :(

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I bought Affinity Photo, impressed with all of its capabilities. I also use it in game development, and was very surprised to find that it doesn't support exporting TGA. It's bizarre. At least with BMP, I can copy and paste into another program and save. TGA includes layers and channels that just aren't easily copied/pasted. I'm not only very surprised that there is no support for TGA, but even more surprised that the request was put in two years ago, and hasn't been taken seriously. Please add support.

That being said, I am very glad it can at least open TGAs. That just makes it even more confusing that I can't export, but at least I can make an edit to a combined RGB, single layer TGA and save in a different program that does support it.

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