On DDS conversion

Tips for creating and manipulating planet textures for Celestia.
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rthorvald
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Joined: 20.10.2003
With us: 21 years 1 month
Location: Norway

On DDS conversion

Post #1by rthorvald » 26.10.2004, 14:31

I have finally got hold of a tool to convert DDS files on OSX; the new GraphicConverter can read and write DXT 1, 3 and 5.

However, the output quality sucks: see example below - JPG first, then DDS DXT1.

... So, is this normal, or is it just GraphicConverter that handles the conversion badly?

Image

Help on this very appreciated!

-rthorvald

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t00fri
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Location: Hamburg, Germany

Post #2by t00fri » 26.10.2004, 19:28

rthorvald,

yes, this is a familiar issue. Before your time in the
forum, we had extensive "R&D"-type discussions on that issue.

-- Take at least DXT3/24bit color. For textures it's OK.
Forget about DXT1.
-- You need a good conversion algorithm. Unfortunately,
some converters are still buggy. The nvidia tool is
quite good but excessively slow and limited to <= 16k
textures. So for me this is not interesting.

Hence, I coded my own converter ('texconvert')
that uses the latest open source DeVIL library. It's
lightening fast and good for DXT1,3,5.

The sources are available. I even coded a port for Win,
since the Win guys kept complaining that they were
unable to learn how to do a trivial compile themselves
with a free compiler in Win...(I will never be able to
follow this logics..)

-- For hires /normal/ maps, DXT3 is still a big problem.
DDS format is just not smooth enough. JPG/PNG
almost always win, but these formats are too
slow/large for really big textures.


Bye Fridger

Topic author
rthorvald
Posts: 1223
Joined: 20.10.2003
With us: 21 years 1 month
Location: Norway

Post #3by rthorvald » 27.10.2004, 02:43

t00fri wrote:yes, this is a familiar issue


Thank you for your notes on this!
It is evident GraphicConverter isn?t a good tool for this; it has no way of specifying the details of what to output. I might take a look at your tools, but will have to familiarize myself with deVIL first, i guess.

-rthorvald

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John Van Vliet
Posts: 2944
Joined: 28.08.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months

re

Post #4by John Van Vliet » 30.10.2004, 18:37

some of us can compile
cygwin,mingw,vc7.net
although i am still learning


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