Add support for partially resident textures

[helmut.bressler]

Hello Unigine Team,

 

I'm not sure if that is the right place to post feature requests, but I give it a try :-)

 

In our projects we typically have a rather fixed camera path (some applications are even without user interaction) but it gets finalized only very late of the development process.

Once this has been done we discover that some textures are too low res and some are too high res, if the whole texture is affected it is very simple to fix. However it also happens that only some areas are too low res or too high res and in such cases it would be nice if resolution can be changed on a finer level.

And thats the place were partially resident textures come into play. I would be totally happy if we had an editor where you can statically assign tiles. I could imagine an editor where one can subdivide a grid in order to decide how much resolution an area of a texture gets. I made a small example:

 

Each cell gets a constant resolution, which means that bigger cells get a lower resolution in the final image.

 

Thats just a suggestion for increasing productivity. It could save some time otherwise spent into recreating atlases or uv layouts.

 

On the other hand it shouldn't be too difficult to implement (for latest directx and opengl at least), as it is orthogonal to the other things going on with renderer (I mean PBR).

 

Thanks for reading this!

[silent]

Hi Helmut,

 

If I understand you correctly, you are talking about megatexture approach? I'm afraid it would not be implemented.

 

Please, refer to this forum topic: https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/2131-terrain-megatexture-approach/

 

However, some tool for increasing/decreasing terrain textures quality indeed would be very useful.

 

Thanks!

[helmut.bressler]

Hello Silent,

 

That is exactly what I'm talking about, megatexturing can be done using partially resident textures.

I would be totally happy having them as static textures, just in case it turns out that a texture is too low res in some region only and increasing the resolution isn't a feasible solution due to overall memory constraints.

 

but I totally understand that other things are more important, I just wanted to point out that there is a use case for static partially resident textures, not only, as it is very often advertised, for the dynamic case where you have to stream data to the textures.

 

Thank you for your response though

 Cheers Helmut