...And VTEX is?

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Vtex

Basically what I'm talking about is adding a "save to VTF" option for textures. Implementation-wise it would actually save to TGA then invoke vtex.exe to make a VTF, then delete the TGA. Right now I use VTFEdit, but usually I don't need to edit externally so I might as well just save directly to VTF from blender.

Oh, right, that tool. I'm sorry, I thought this was in the Source FilmMaker forum... (I'm subscribed to both this and that forum, and there only rarely arrive new discussions on this forum.) Well, due to the many options for VTF files, and the fact Source 2 (which natively supports TGA files) has been released for Dota 2 and might not take too long to arrive for other Source games, I'd personally say a VTF exporter for Blender might be quite... well, clumsy? I wouldn't mind one being made, not at all, I'd just prefer it to not be a part of the Blender Source Tools themselves.

That isn't a huge improvement over the normal workflow. You can very easily create a shell script which makes vtex compile every new/altered TGA in your materialsrc folder.

You may be interested in my GIMP plug-in though.[code.google.com]

Thanks for BST and the GIMP plugin. (Haven't tried the gimp plugin yet but the blender addon works well.)

It seems like whether vtex "compile" is a workflow improvement depends on whether you need to edit in GIMP or not. If you don't (like there were some way to copy regular grayscale images into the alpha channel of other textures) then it probably would be. I'd kind of like to create something that copies the specular/envmap into the alpha channel of the diffuse texture so I could just save it off and avoid having to use gimp or some other tool to do that.

The texture painting stuff in blender does most of what I want. The only real problem I have is with maps that are stored in the alpha channel.