Acorn RISC PD-CD 1/Acorn RISC PD-CD 1.iso/raytracers/_dkbtrace/dkb/docs/tga2dump

Text File | 1991-05-16 | 1.6 KB | 37 lines

TGA2Dump -  An Image File Format Conversion Utility

Version 1.1 by Aaron A. Collins

This program and documentation are hereby released to the public domain.

"Targa" is a trademark of AT&T Truevision.

TGA2Dump is a utility to convert Targa 16, 24, or 32 bits/pixel files into
DKB/QRT raw "Dump" format files.

This utility is intended primarily for importing "true color" (usu. 24 bit)
Targa format imagemaps into DKB.

BIG-D is a commercial raytracer which comes with several textures in .WIN
format.  This format is in fact amazingly similar to Targa-16.  In fact, just
rename the *.WIN files to *.TGA, and use TGA2Dump to import them.

TGA2DUMP will also allow you to use the output of DKB "recursively" ;-) by
feeding it's output back in upon itself.

This utility will be included with all versions of DKB as of Version 2.05C or
2.06 whichever comes first.

Note that as of this time, there is no support for RLE-compressed nor Color-
Mapped Targa files, only true-color images are processed.  The program should
refuse to operate on these types of image files.  If you have such a file,
you'd probably be better off converting it to a .GIF file using VPIC or some
other converter.  Being already color-mapped, there will be little or no loss
of image color resolution, and it will take up considerably less memory (about
1/3 the memory) when rendering GIF vs. RAW imagemaps with DKB.

Rendering with 24-bit imagemaps is more rewarding than using GIF/IFF images.
This is mostly because the entire operation is being done in 24-bit color, and
the texture realism that is possible is much greater than that with low color
resolution color-mapped images.