[TF2] B.A.S.E. Jumper blue skin has noticeably lower image quality than red skin

[treacherousfiend]

In the December 7, 2023 patch, a blue skin for the B.A.S.E. Jumper was added to the game, which was a welcome addition, however the blue skin is of a noticeably lower quality to its red counterpart, with splotchier color and more aliasing. I would recommend opening each image in a new tab and swapping between them, or for some of the smaller images downloading them and viewing them in a local image viewer that does not filter images when you zoom in.

On basically every green part of part of the B.A.S.E. Jumper on the blue skin you can see splotchier colors that look almost like JPG artifacts. (before anyone corrects me, yes I know this is how DXT compression works)

While the red skin obviously isn't perfect, if you look at the textures themselves you can see just how much worse the colors are, as well as weird black aliased seams between sections of the model, which may be indicative of a lower sample rate when baking ambient occlusion into the texture, although these don't appear to be visible ingame. Things like the spade pattern on the parachute are much sharper on the blue version (although still seem to have a bit of anti-aliasing?) than the red variant Red

Blue

Red

Blue

[ArtKitCat]

This was due to the original creators just extracting the current in-game texture, making it blue, and exporting it back as a VTF (probably), then using the default DXT5 format, thus losing more of the texture. A simple workaround would be to format it as RGBA8888 instead if the original photoshop files are gone. This would have to be done by the workshop creators and not Valve, due to legal reasons and whatnot.

[treacherousfiend]

Exporting and re-importing a DXT5 texture does not cause anti-aliasing to suddenly become aliased in this way (this way specifically being a complete lack in some places, smooth edges being replaced by completely black pixels). I did not, however, realize that the item was community made and not Valve made, so that definitely does make things a bit more difficult, due to the aforementioned legal issues (plus some community members are a bit hard to contact).

[ZoeySmith37]

This was due to the original creators just extracting the current in-game texture, making it blue, and exporting it back as a VTF (probably), then using the default DXT5 format, thus losing more of the texture. A simple workaround would be to format it as RGBA8888 instead if the original photoshop files are gone. This would have to be done by the workshop creators and not Valve, due to legal reasons and whatnot.

The source files we sent them were not this compressed, and are based on the original uncompressed source files, neither the vtfs or the tgas we sent look like these. Valve mucked it up.

[treacherousfiend]

Ah, so the usual with Valve, thanks for clearing up the confusion!