tdlmake preprocesses TIFF, PNG, JPEG, GIF, IFF(6), SGI, PIC(7), PSD(8), TGA(9), "bake," Radiance and OpenEXR files to convert them into an efficient texture format suitable to 3Delight. It can also convert a zfile into a shadow map. We recommend running tdlmake on all textures before rendering, for two reasons:
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.
Note that a converted file is a normal TIFF that can be viewed with any image viewer. We suggest using a `.tdl' extension for 3Delight texture files.
Command Line Parameters
Working With Large Textures
As mentioned, tdlmake has been designed to adapt very well to huge 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:
% 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:
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:
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:
% 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) :
tdlmake -fov 90 -envcube in?.tif envmap.tdl
To create a texture using the high quality downsampling mode and show progress while doing so:tdlmake -progress -quality high grid.tif grid.tdl
To create a shadow map from a zfile (The zfile display driver):
tdlmake -shadow data.z shadowmap.tdl