"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets."
- Alan Cooper
More pages: 1 2 3 4
3Dc texture tool
Monday, May 31, 2004 | Permalink

I've started playing around with the 3Dc normal compression format now that I have an X800pro card. For this I quickly wrote a small commandline tool for my convenience, and of course I'm sharing it with anyone out there that's interested. It's available for download in the cool stuff section.
It's a very simple tool, and you'll need the texconv.exe file from the DirectX9 SDK for it to work, but it's very convenient. Make a shortcut to it, and just drop a heightmap image file on the shortcut. The tool will create the output 3Dc file in DDS format in the same directory as the source file. DDS loading code is available in my framework, which I btw updated to support 3Dc, in Direct3D at least for now.

Anyway, I'll have a 3Dc demo up some time soon. Depends on how much spare time I will have.

Name

Comment

Enter the code below



NeoKenobi
Friday, June 11, 2004

What the hell is a geometry instancing feature? You make it sound like it's the next generation T&L or something. BTW MesserFuerFrauSchmid, [sarcastic] ofcouse we all know that Nvidia is the best company in the whole world and that ATI is just a small humble company making crappy products. OpenGL is outdated and Direct3D is the future of mankind! [/sarcastic]

Humus
Saturday, June 12, 2004

Instancing is a feature that allows you to draw many objects of the same kind with only one draw call. It's not supported by the X800, but I don't cry over it. It's only useful in very uncommon situations where you have lots of very simple objects so that the draw call becomes the bottleneck. And even if that happens you can get around the problem by simply packing many objects into the same vertex buffer.

Nico
Saturday, June 12, 2004

I searched for the 3Dc compression in dds files but I couldn't find any information about it. I'm quite interested because I'm writing a viewer that is able to read (and write) dds files, so could you post a link? TIA.

Nico
Saturday, June 12, 2004

Oh, sorry, I just found it myself. Together with the source of your converter I should be able to figure it out. For others, here's the white paper:
http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx800/3DcWhitePaper.pdf
Nice Job & Thanks!

Nico
Sunday, June 13, 2004

Another quesion: If the FourCC for 3Dc textures is ATI2, what does ATI1 mean? And are there more ATIx FourCCs? TIA.

Nico
Sunday, June 13, 2004

Another quesion: If the FourCC for 3Dc textures is ATI2, what does ATI1 mean? And are there more ATIx FourCCs? TIA.

Humus
Sunday, June 13, 2004

Well, the non-marketing name for 3Dc is ATI2N, and ATI2 is obviously then the first four chars.

fivefives
Tuesday, June 15, 2004

have you seen this, yet? thought it was VERY interesting.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/radeon/rx800-3.html#p10

don't tell the ATI bigwigs, though

More pages: 1 2 3 4