Mip Maps ruining textures

[Guest]

Hi everyone,i've got a little problem with my textures in creating mip maps. The size of the textures is 1024x1024 and they will be used for a parking ramp. There are 28 of these images. I know they are a large, but I want to get a good resolution. Now I want to create mip maps for these textures. Unfortunately Microsoft's image tool is ruining my texture due the fact that when creating the mip maps it also dithers the full image, even though it has been imported into image tool as an 8bit image. I use paint shop pro to reduce the colour depth to 8bit since the conversion done is much better than image tool.Unfortunately, Martin Wright's BMP2000 can only accept images up to 512x512, though it seems that when BMP2000 creates mip maps it doesn't touch the actual texture and that is what I want.Can someone help me about this? All i want is to create mip maps for a 1024x1024 image, without ruining my largest image.Thanks and RegardsDaniel

[arno 1]

I always use ImageTool, but I save them as DXT1. That is a 16 bit format, so you always have better colors then with a 8 bit texture. I have never seen that the texture looks bad.

[Guest]

If you really want to stick with 8 bit then BmpExt will cope with 1024x1024 source images. It wasn`t possible to expand Bmp2000 to handle these sizes (or non-square images) so BmpExt was written to allow the conversion and transparency editing in these cases. Imagetool does indeed do its own re-optimising of images when you save in 8 bit (even if the image was 8 bit to start with). not always what you want.

[Guest]

Thanks to both Arno and Martin for your replies. Although I had bmpext already I didn't know that when you save an image, it automatically creates the mip maps for you.Regarding dxt1 Arno, unfortunately it still deteriorates the quality of my textures probably due to the fact that I used the anti-alising option in paint shop pro in order to create curved taxi-lines. Thus there was a huge range of colours being used.Thanks once again.Daniel

[nudata 10]

Terrabuilder uses Imagetool. Could this account for the photo-real textures appearing more blurred than the stock textures???DickKLBE

[Guest]

Dick, don't know if you have any of my sceneries, but you could test your question if you do....I haven't used terrabuilder, but I think the process that Misho used and I use are identical, except the use of imagetool. I use FStexConvert by Elrond Elvish (which I beleive is partly using code from Martin Wright) to convert the textures to dxt1 + alpha.Do you see my textures as less fuzzy than yours, if so...your theory holds.Bob Bernstein

[nudata 10]

I have not played with any photo-real stuff for awhile. I actually only used Terrabuilder to create the INF file and then used a simple script to run the SDK programs. If I get some time I will try Elrond's tool. Even the Microsoft photo-real textures seem somewhat less clear than the stock textures. This may be an illusion created by the desire to look as deeply as possible into the tempting scenery. I had tried using Terrascene to create large are sceneries. However, the result was artifical textures that lacked the blending and autogen of MS textures. I even used the MS textures.I am into Ground2K right now "tuning up" the roads and rivers in my area.Regards,Dick BoleyNear PittsburghKLBE