My custom terrain paint texture keeps disappearing.

Linamints

(Cross posting from MTS)
I am working on my second world and I am having a problem. Most of the textures being used for it are custom textures, well one of the most critical textures for this world won't stay put when I place it. It will look fine until I start working on something else or leave the terrain paint.
If I start painting again it will show up, but once I stop it has about a 7/10 chance of disappearing again. The same thing happens if I edit the surrounding terrain, it appears briefly and then disappears again.

How the terrain looks when the textures are correct:


After switching to the sculpt tab:


The texture is a dds saved with a DXT5 compression.

I am using the 1.67 version of Sims 3 and CAW and I am using the steam version on Windows 7.
The world I'm working in is a large world using 33 textures, 31 of which are custom, with some of the customs being recolors of base CAW textures.

I have tried the following:
Restarted world with half the custom textures I had before
Re-sizing large HD textures to easy strain on CAW
Saving the texture with a different compression
Saving while the texture was visible (unsuccessful, texture was gone when re-loading)
Re-sizing the texture to make it smaller
Re-saving the texture to make sure I had used the write format
Adding a new layer with the same texture to see if maybe it was just a bad layer
clearing caches and featured items folder from the CAW folder
Re-naming the mods folder to keep CAW from reading it
Clearing caches after re-naming mods folder

Rflong7

Hi

That is one disgusting pile of worms. O.O

Anyway... I have never seen it happen. And this is in CAW when you sculpt the world map?
Have you finished Sculpting the map, paint, then export to see how it looks in game?

Maybe save it for last?

Linamints

@Rflong7 I know, isn't it glorious? This world is based on Alpha Centauri, the worm texture is to carry over the spirit of the horrifying mind worms .

I have finished sculpting the terrain, what I meant is I can go to sculpt tab and just lightly tap to see if it changed the texture and had a similar result. It happens if I sculpt or paint. If I leave the terrain tab completely the texture always disappears.
The only thing I have found to let me keep painting was to overwrite a texture that was higher up on the list that wasn't as important.
Do you know if CAW has a hard time reading many textures?

Rflong7

Hm...I don't know. How many do you have?
For best results you should keep it down to 8 paints per chunck - it doesn't have to be the same but 8 per. Better computers handle more- but that's EA's suggestion. I and others have a few chuncks over that by 1 or 2.

You should make sure to have one one layer per paint. Don't have the same paint on more than 1... Not one rock or anything, that 1 worm paint. Don't make more of that paint layer...

Linamints

@Rflong7 I have 33 textures total in the paint area, 31 of which are custom.

And do you mean that when say, I am painting rock and dirt, I need to make separate layers for both? Because I will admit I did all painting on the first layers and only added new layers for trees and spawners.

Rflong7

Oh, no no. The paint is all on the map and not the world layers. The world layers are for objects and lots. Roads and paint go directly to the map.

We had a cross communication. When you said you moved up a layer you meant the world layers for objects- I was thinking you would copy over another paint layer.
When talking paint layers, they are their own layers and are listed that way.- listed in their own panel.... they layer one at a time- 1st is the bottom layer and as you add paints to the options last is the top~ Like painting in real life.

It's useful to know for the options below that - individual layers options.

*You also might want to check you chunk paint layers to see how many you have per chunk.

There's the option in the terrain paints for ... let me open CAW.

Okay- to check your layers (go for 8 different paints per chunk- but a few chunks are fine).

To show Chunk Boundaries- white lines. Each are 256 squares. Tiny maps are 1 chunk and up from there.


Individual Layers will show paints


Click on a paint in the list of paints- if it's in the chunck it will turn that chunk black.

If there are more than 8 paints per chunck it will turn that chunck line orange.


Maybe you do have too many different paints on each chunk and you can clean them up a little- remove any strays or unnecessary paints to use the ones you really need.

Rflong7

But Never remove the base layer- the bottom, 1st layer ... the one that covers the whole world map.

I hope that was helpful.