Animated Textures
One of my goals in Ultra Engine is to avoid "black box" file formats and leave all game assets in common file formats that can be easily read in a variety of programs. For this reason, I put a lot of effort into the Pixmap class and the DDS load and save capabilities.
In Ultra Engine animated textures can be stored in a volume texture. To play the animation, the W component of the UVW texcoord is scrolled. The fragment shader will sample the volume texture between the nearest two slices on the Z axis of the texture, resulting in a smooth transition between frames using linear interpolation. There's no need to constantly swap a lot of textures in a material, as all animation frames are packed away in a single DDS file.
The code below shows how multiple animation frames can be loaded and saved into a 3D texture:
int framecount = 128; std::vector<shared_ptr<Pixmap> > pixmaps(framecount); for (int n = 0; n < framecount; ++n) { pixmaps[n] = LoadPixmap("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Leadwerks/Documentation/master/Assets/Materials/Animations/water1_" + String(n) + ".png"); } SaveTexture("water1.dds", TEXTURE_3D, pixmaps, framecount);
Here is the animation playing in the engine:
The resulting DDS file is 32 MB for a 256x256x128 RGBA texture:
You can open this DDS file in Visual Studio and view it. Note that the properties indicate this is the first slice of 128, verifying that our texture does contain the animation data:
Adding Mipmaps
The DDS format supports mipmaps in volume textures. A volume mipmap is just a lower-resolution image of the original, with all dimensions half the size of the previous frame, with a minimum dimension of 1. They are stored in the DDS file in descending order. The code below is a little complicated, but it will reliably compute mipmaps for any volume texture. Note the code is creating another STL vector called "mipchain" where all slices of all mipmaps are stored in order:
auto plg = LoadPlugin("Plugins/FITextureLoader.dll"); int framecount = 128; std::vector<shared_ptr<Pixmap> > pixmaps(framecount); for (int n = 0; n < framecount; ++n) { pixmaps[n] = LoadPixmap("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Leadwerks/Documentation/master/Assets/Materials/Animations/water1_" + String(n) + ".png"); } //Build mipmaps iVec3 size = iVec3(pixmaps[0]->size.x, pixmaps[0]->size.y, pixmaps.size()); auto mipchain = pixmaps; while (true) { auto osize = size; size.x = Max(1, size.x / 2); size.y = Max(1, size.y / 2); size.z = Max(1, size.z / 2); for (int n = 0; n < size.z; ++n) { auto a = pixmaps[n * 2 + 0]; auto b = pixmaps[n * 2 + 1]; auto mipmap = CreatePixmap(osize.x, osize.x, pixmaps[0]->format); for (int x = 0; x < pixmaps[0]->size.x; ++x) { for (int y = 0; y < pixmaps[0]->size.y; ++y) { int rgba0 = a->ReadPixel(x, y); int rgba1 = b->ReadPixel(x, y); int rgba = RGBA((Red(rgba0)+Red(rgba1))/2, (Green(rgba0) + Green(rgba1)) / 2, (Blue(rgba0) + Blue(rgba1)) / 2, (Alpha(rgba0) + Alpha(rgba1)) / 2); mipmap->WritePixel(x, y, rgba); } } mipmap = mipmap->Resize(size.x, size.y); pixmaps[n] = mipmap; mipchain.push_back(mipmap); } if (size == iVec3(1, 1, 1)) break; } SaveTexture("water1.dds", TEXTURE_3D, mipchain, framecount);
The resulting DDS file is a little bigger (36.5 MB) because it includes the mipmaps.
We can open this DDS file in Visual Studio and verify that the mipmaps are present and look correct:
Texture Compression
Volume textures can be stored in compressed texture formats. This is particularly useful for volume textures, since they are so big. Compressing all the mipmaps in a texture before saving can be easily done by replacing the last line of code in the previous example with the code below. We're going to use BC5 compression because this is a normal map.
//Compress all images for (int n = 0; n < mipchain.size(); ++n) { mipchain[n] = mipchain[n]->Convert(TEXTURE_BC5); } SaveTexture("water1.dds", TEXTURE_3D, mipchain, framecount);
The resulting DDS file is just 9.14 MB, about 25% the size of our uncompressed DDS file.
When we open this file in Visual Studio, we can verify the texture format is BC5 and the blue channel has been removed. (Only the red and green channels are required for normal maps, as the Z component can be reconstructed in the fragment shader): Other types of textures may use a different compression format.
This method can be used to make animated water, fire, lava, explosions and other effects packed away into a single DDS file that can be easily read in a variety of programs.
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