PHOTO Texturing, Great Masters,..Pls Help

[Guest Peter Bruun]

Nearly Finished with my Project, i face some heavy Impact from the textured objects. Im using NovaSim, Paintshop Pro, and textures are 512x512,256 coulours bmps. I have a medium machine, 2,4 Ghz,1 GB ram, Geforce/5600. I have an overall very nice framerate (24-29 frps fs locked at 30) but passing the buildings,(even they are loaded much earlier) they have an impact on plane (it jerks), and slow momentarily FRPs down. In other words, they seems to Stick to the plane ;o).I wonder if there are any possibility of "easing" the loads/impact of the PHOTO textures, or other parameters to attend to (Im very New in this field)And how does other designers manage large Airpors, mine has aprx. 60 buildings. I have gone very harshly through the details in the scenery, so its very "clean" with no FRP hungry details, and i have also decreased the numbers of diff. bmps so the FS need to load less.Still, i need to get rid of the jerks.To have a happy ending, i need some advice, and before im using the big butche knife on the incredible nice (but many) buildings.All help are Welcome,And Thanks In advace

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Hello Peter,Before you get rid of any buildings, why don't you try a little experiment?Take all your textures and make copies of them, but with dimensions of 256x256 pixels. This is a quarter the size of the originals. Try them instead and see what happens.Next, you can try modulating your use of textures. Try using low-resolution textures for places where an aircraft will not go or see, and higher resolution textures only where they will be close to the viewpoint and visible.Make sure that all your textures are in DXT format with mipmaps.Please let us know how it turns out, if you decide to try this.Best regards.Luis

[Guest Peter Bruun]

Hej luis Tonight i have converted most textures to 256X256, and must say it makes a great difference, Just Great!. I have now a pleasent vue, not being forced to remove buildings ect.Next, would be to look at the MIP matter, but there i am a little short af knowledge, so if you could give me a hint, it is most appreciated. :-smooch Thanks for your kind Help

[toprob 105]

If you haven't made mipmaps, you may be able to keep the bigger textures. Mipmaps are effectively smaller textures from a distance -- so you get the benefit of the larger textures up close, but as you fly by you'll see smaller mipmaps.Load your original textures into Imagetool, create mipmaps (a menu choice -- easy!) and convert to DXT1 format, then save into your texture folder. (Don't overwrite your original textures though!)

[arno 1]

And as you probably have quite a lot of textures, you can also use the batch function of ImageTool. Just run it from the DOS prompt in the folder of your textures with a command like this:imagetool -dxt *.bmp(mipmaps are added by default).

[Guest Peter Bruun]

Thanks to Tobrop and ArnoI will try to DWL immagetoool, and see if further improvements can be made. Keep You posted

[Guest Peter Bruun]

Hej Arno, you wrote;>> you can also use the batch function of ImageTool. Just run it from the DOS prompt in the folder of your textures with a command like this <

[Guest ScottR]

One other thing you might do is, from within gmax, delete all faces on buildings that you don't see e.g. those on the underside of the buildings.Regards

[bob.bernstein 0]

you don't use the interface you are used to. To use imagetool in batch mode: open a command dos box...its cmd.exe in windows xp. Find imagetool.. once you find it type at the prompt:imagetool -h that will give you all the available options you can use in batch mode.Best,bob Bernstein

[Holger 0]

Howdy,I think I posted these before but they disappear after two weeks or so. These are screenshots of the imagetool help screen, first one for the F2002 SDK version, second for the FS9 SDK version.Cheers, Holgerhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/99155.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/99157.jpg

[Guest Peter Bruun]

Thanks to You Bob and Holger, i will mount my working boots and try it out :-jumpy