tdlmake preprocesses TIFF, PNG, JPEG, GIF, IFF(6), SGI, PIC(7), PSD(8), TGA(9), "bake," Radiance and OpenEXR files and convert them into an efficient texture format suitable to 3Delight for rendering. It can also convert a zfile into a shadow map. Optimizing textures using tdlmake have the following benefits:
tdlmakecreates a mipmapped version of the original texture, allowing 3Delight to produce nicer images more efficiently.- 3Delight employs a caching mechanism for texture data which works well with tiled images. Using raw (striped) non-converted TIFFs may degrade overall performance.
| Info |
|---|
The optimized texture is saved into a regular TIFF file format that can be viewed with any image viewer. For clarity, we recommend using a .tdl extension for 3Delight texture files. |
Command Line Options
tdlmake is invoked by specifying at least two file names and an optional set of command-line switches:
% tdlmake [options] input.tif [input2.tif ... input6.tif] output.tif
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
Output Format | |
-envlatl | |
-envcube | |
-twofish | |
-lightprobe | |
-dirtex | |
-shadow | |
Color Profiles | |
-colorspace space | |
-gamme g | |
-rgbagamma r g b a | |
Compression | |
-lzw | |
-deflate | |
-packbits | |
| |
Texture Filtering | |
-filter f | |
-filterwidth n | |
-sfilterwidth n | |
-tfilterwidth n | |
-window w | |
-blur n | |
-scale n | |
-qality | |
-nomipmap | |
Texture Wrapping Modes | |
-smode | |
-tmode | |
-mode | |
Output Data Type | |
-byte / -sbyte | |
-short / -sshort | |
-float | |
Image Orientation | |
-flipst | |
-flips | |
-flipt | |
Working With Large Textures
tdlmake has been designed to work with any textures, including very large production-grade textures. One exception is compressed TIFFs that have a large "rows per strip" value. Here is an example output of tiffinfo on a large texture file that can cause problems for tdlmake:
| Code Block |
|---|
% tiffinfo earth.tif Image Width: 43200 Image Length: 21600 Resolution: 72, 72 (unitless) Bits/Sample: 8 Compression Scheme: AdobeDeflate Photometric Interpretation: RGB color FillOrder: msb-to-lsb Software: "ImageMagick 5.5.7 07/22/03 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org" Document Name: "earth.tif" Orientation: row 0 top, col 0 lhs Samples/Pixel: 3 Rows/Strip: 21600 Planar Configuration: single image plane Predictor: horizontal differencing 2 (0x2) |
There is only one strip, made of 21600 (total image height) rows. This means that accessing any scanline in this TIFF forces the TIFF reading library to uncompress the entire file(12). In order to lower memory usage for such large files, it is suggested that a lower "rows per strip" count be used. Typically, 16 or 32 scanlines is a good choice. tdlmake prints a warning if it encounters a file that has the aforementioned problem:
| Code Block |
|---|
tdlmake: warning, reading texture 'earth.tif' may take a large tdlmake: amount of memory. Please refer to user's manual if you are tdlmake: unable to convert this file. |
Examples
Here are some examples using tdlmake on the command line:
To create a texture named grid.tdl from a TIFF named grid.tif using a gaussian downsampling filter of width 4:
| Code Block |
|---|
tdlmake -filter gaussian -filterwidth 4 grid.tif grid.tdl |
To create a cubic environment map in which all cube sides were rendered using 90 degrees field of view:
| Code Block |
|---|
% tdlmake -fov 90 -envcube \ in1.tif in2.tif in3.tif in4.tif in5.tif in6.tif \ envmap.tdl |
or (won't work in a DOS shell):
| Code Block |
|---|
tdlmake -fov 90 -envcube in?.tif envmap.tdl |
To create a texture using the high quality downsampling mode and show progress while doing so:| Code Block |
|---|
tdlmake -progress -quality high grid.tif grid.tdl |
To create a shadow map from a zfile (The zfile display driver):
| Code Block |
|---|
tdlmake -shadow data.z shadowmap.tdl |