How to check SMDI & AS textures with DayZ Tools Tex View

• Where Steam library
• Difficulty Easy

DayZ Tools is a free download on Steam (App 830640). To find it, open your Steam library, switch the filter to include Games and Tools, make sure the Tools checkbox is ticked, then either scroll to it or just type "DayZ Tools" into the search box. Click it, hit Launch, and the DayZ Tools launcher opens with all of its utilities laid out.

From the launcher, look to the bottom-right of the window under the Utilities section. The Texture Viewer is the second entry from the top on the right-hand side. Click it to open the Tex View window - this is the tool you will live in for everything below.

• Where Tex View window
• Difficulty Easy

Across the top you have the File menu (all your open/save commands), a Generate menu, and Next/Previous file buttons that step through everything you have opened in this session. Once a texture is loaded you also get a filter, plus mipmap controls that let you walk forward and back through the texture’s mip levels and preview each one - normal texture, detail, normal map, normalized map with fading, and color plus alpha.

Below that sit the toolbars you can toggle on and off: the status bar, info bar and view bar. You can zoom in and out, and switch the readout between RGB 0-to-1 ranges. The Help menu holds the About box and an Online Help link that opens Bohemia Interactive’s documentation page for the tool - worth bookmarking. Off to the side are the color-format buttons, which is where the real work happens.

• Where Format buttons
• Difficulty Easy

The format buttons let you reinterpret the same texture in different ways. RGBA shows red, green, blue and alpha together; RGB is the same image without the alpha; and Alpha shows just the alpha channel on its own. There is also an "RGB - DXT compressed" view, which displays the texture in its compressed form - smaller on disk and quicker to read, at the cost of some quality.

You also get dedicated Red, Green and Blue channel views, plus a DXT Sectors view. Switching between these is how you read a texture properly: a flat color map looks much the same across channels, but normal, SMDI and AS maps pack very different data into each channel, and viewing them separately is the only way to confirm what is really stored there.

• Where DXT Sectors
• Difficulty Reference

DayZ textures use DXT block compression, and there are three formats worth knowing: DXT1, DXT3 and DXT5. All three are block-oriented codecs that operate on a 4x4 block of pixels. If a texture’s dimensions are not a multiple of four, the size is simply rounded up to the next block boundary.

Each DXT1 block compresses down to 64 bits, which works out to roughly a 6:1 ratio against uncompressed data. You do not need to memorise this, but understanding that the viewer is showing you a compressed representation explains why a DXT view can look slightly different from the raw RGBA one.

• Where File > Open
• Difficulty Easy

Use File > Open to load a texture. Tex View will open PNGs, but it really shines with .paa files - that is the native DayZ texture format and where the channel tools become genuinely useful. The example here is a gas mask color map, which you can find once you have extracted the game files via a P-drive setup.

Scroll the mouse wheel toward you to zoom in and away from you to zoom out. With the color map loaded you can already see the basics: it is a fairly flat image. Switch to the Alpha view and it reads as pure white, meaning there is no meaningful alpha data; switch to the Red channel and it appears greyed out. A plain color texture simply does not carry much per-channel variation, which is exactly why the next steps matter more for your map types.

• Where Split view
• Difficulty Easy

One of the best features of Tex View is the side-by-side comparison. You can pin one view on the left and a different one on the right - for example, the full-color image next to the red channel, or the red channel against the blue channel - and read the differences directly.

On the gas mask color map the blue channel is visibly darker than the others. On a flat color texture these differences are subtle, but the same workflow becomes essential once you are inspecting normal, SMDI or AS maps, where each channel deliberately stores separate data.

• Where Concepts
• Difficulty Reference

Before generating anything, it helps to know what each map type does. A NoHQ is the normal map: it fakes peaks and valleys in the surface shading to give a model the illusion of extra height and detail, tricking the eye into seeing geometry that is not actually in the mesh.

An AS texture handles ambient occlusion - the soft contact shadowing where surfaces meet. The SMDI texture is responsible for the surface response: metallic, lighting, shine and roughness. Together with the color map, these are the maps that make a model read as plastic, metal, rubber or fabric under the game’s lighting.

• Where File > Open
• Difficulty Easy

To see what a properly authored SMDI looks like, open the dev version from the extracted game files - for the mask it lives under characters\masks\color and ends in _SMDI.paa. Load it and the difference from a color map is immediate: the left view jumps to white while the right shows a very different color set.

Step through the channels and you will see the green channel is mostly black with some grey fading, while the RGB view carries dark reds, pinks and violets. That is because an SMDI packs several distinct signals across its channels. Comparing the green channel against the red channel side by side shows just how much information a real, hand-built SMDI carries - a useful benchmark for the generated version you are about to create.

• Where File > Save As
• Difficulty Easy

Here is the headline trick. Open your color map (in RGBA), then go to File > Save As. In the filename, delete the "_co" suffix and replace it with "_SMDI" before the extension. Tex View detects that you are saving to a different map type and automatically builds an SMDI from the base color. Click Save.

Now File > Open the new _SMDI file. You have a working SMDI generated straight from the color. Check the channels: the red channel is fully white and the green is greyed out, and comparing against the blue shows the differences. Hold this up against the dev SMDI from the previous step and you will see the generated one is far simpler - but it is a perfectly usable stopgap.

Important caveat: a hand-built SMDI will always outperform a generated one. The same Save As trick can technically produce a NoHQ too, but do not - the auto-generated normal map is genuinely poor. Use generation for SMDI and AS only, as a temporary stand-in until you can author your own.

• Where File > Save As
• Difficulty Easy

The AS map uses the identical workflow. Open your color map again, confirm you are on RGBA, then File > Save As and change the suffix to "_AS" before the extension. Save, then open the new file to inspect the result.

The generated AS reads with pink tones, and unlike a flat color map its blue and red channels are not fully white - a quick visual confirmation that the viewer produced real per-channel data. As with the SMDI, treat this as a fast way to give a color-only model some lighting and occlusion response while you learn to craft proper RVMAT maps by hand.