Guide to mipmapping and optimising textures

[Samaritano 304]

Great. Thanks Toby.

[Fi5kuS 57]

Nice reading! Will definitly try this out for myself when I get home from vaccation.

 

I'm curious, have you tried this with heavy addons such as PMDG T7, NGX etc or mega-airports? It should drastically reduce VAS consumption but I don't know the scope and amount of textures that need to be mipmapped in order to achieve such.

[toby23 136]

I don't own any PMDG products or mega airports for P3D, so cannot comment, sorry.

[twharrell 38]

Open it in imagetool, see section V. How to check if a texture needs converting above.

 

Right, but in the file in your example wasn't mipmapped because it had only 1 mip-level.  Does that mean if there are 2 or more mip-levels one can assume the texture has been mipmapped? 

[toby23 136]

I meant a bit further along where you see this image..

2 mip levels are not enough. However many miplevels the Nvidia tool or Imagetool add, that is the correct amount. Like I mentioned, you can also tell by the file size, 1366mb, for example, shows a correctly optimised texture, 1025mb is a texture without mipmaps. I appreciate you wanting to learn this, it's why I wrote the guide after all, but read it again as all this information is in there. I know it's a lot to learn but take it slowly and soon you'll understand how it all fits together.. 

[Fi5kuS 57]

I don't own any PMDG products or mega airports for P3D, so cannot comment, sorry.

Ok, thanks

[newtie 533]

Hi-

 

I've got PS (w/plugin) and ImageTool installed.

 

What do you do if a .dds will not open in either?  :>)

 

Thanks,

Mark

[toby23 136]

Try opening it in DXTBmp and saving it as a 32 bit.bmp.

Which file is it?

[newtie 533]

Well, it seems you have to use the 64bit Nvidia plugin with the 64bit version of PS which I have.

 

Who'd a thunk it? :>)

 

Works fine now. 

 

Cheers,

Mark

[twharrell 38]

I meant a bit further along where you see this image..

2 mip levels are not enough. However many miplevels the Nvidia tool or Imagetool add, that is the correct amount. Like I mentioned, you can also tell by the file size, 1366mb, for example, shows a correctly optimised texture, 1025mb is a texture without mipmaps. I appreciate you wanting to learn this, it's why I wrote the guide after all, but read it again as all this information is in there. I know it's a lot to learn but take it slowly and soon you'll understand how it all fits together..

Ah, got it. For some reason I thought the file size indicated whether it was DXT5 or DXT1 compressed, not whether it was mipmapped.

[toby23 136]

:excl: Last night I looked through the textures of various stock aircraft included with a default install of P3D v2.5 and discovered, to my disappointment, that third party aircraft that are now included by default in Prepar3d are NOT optimised.

In FSX, ALL included aircraft were correctly optimised, most likely as they were first party.

Feel free to back up the originals and optimise these too, if you use them and if you want them to display correctly, i.e. no shimmering textures.

[warbirds 555]

Great read, thanks. I do not have photoshop and have used PSP7 for many years doing both hobby texturing and professional texturing. I have always used DXTBmp for all converting of textures and only work in 32 bit except for the final where I begrudgingly switch to DXT5 for users.

 

Not sure why you would need photoshop and Image Tool when DXTBmp does it all. I find it a simple task to open in DXTBmp, send to PSP7, work textures, save, reopen edited textures in DXTBmp and save in format I want to FSX. 

[toby23 136]

Just to emphasise why it is so important to optimise your textures.

 

Last night, I optimised a set of textures on a recently released payware aircraft that totalled over 700 mb in size.

Optimised, they take up 130 mb and look just as good, if not better.

 

That means 570 mb more VAS, the difference perhaps between an OOM crash or not for many of you.

[Samaritano 304]

I tried optimizing an aircraft livery (Flysimware MU2) and even following the guide the textures came upside down. I'll post a screenshot later.

[johnbrander 0]

Very interesting and in depth guide, thanks a lot. My main concern with P3D is indeed running out of VAS so everything in this area catches my interest. However, all of us sitting at home and doing this optimisation seems, well wrong. Is there any reason for the suppliers not doing this and supplying optimised textures? Is this sort of a "new found" or something, meaning that it was not common knowledge even by developers? Meaning also that we may receive updates soon that are indeed optimised from the supplier?