Why no Mipmaps on cockpit textures ED?

Hi.

Yesterday I got my P51... and I was hit again by flickering texts in the cockpit... my eyes were hurting.

Today I opened the cockpit files in photo editing program and I see the most rich in detail and text textures have no mipmaps but those that have little details like reflections have a lot of them.

Why?:joystick:

for example... cockpit gauges are left TGA... and some textures with texts... some have only 2 mipmaps although at max zoom out you kinda need 4 but... textures with pilot suit that is very close to the eye always... has numerous mips... dunno 8 or so...

The F15 cockpit and A10 suffers from the same thing.

The graphic drivers should make mip maps on the fly but aparently they don't... also creating those mips could be more taxing at performance/quality than making them from the start.

edit.

I think the drivers fail to do mips on DDS files but on TGA works OK.

later edit

But the two TGA files can be easily replaced by DDS files with mips the naming has to be name.tga.dds. The gunsight reflex and the main front dash were TGA. maybe improves FPS also...

OK here are some pictures so the people will not think I talk some spooky language:

pics are crop outs from 1920x1080 BMP print screens saved as BMP also. Look at the text on labels. I assure you while moving your head those texts are dancing like crazy.

unfiltered.bmp

filtered.bmp

oh... and :D

Haha, that's awesome!

If anyone like me isn't 100% sure what MIPmaps are Here is Wikipedia

zaelu could you attached the files you have changed so we can see the difference ourselves, and no I don't mean the women. :)

Is just one girl (woman by now... :D ) Isabelle Adjani... but I still try to find what is the correct size for the image so it will not get modified in aspect ratio

Here is a link to all the cockpits for what I had redone mipmaps. No other modification to them at all. Ka50 cockpit is made by RICARDO. No modification to it besides adding lower mipmaps to some of the textures that hadn't. So they are just a resave.

But if somehow those resaves are not kosher with someone I can delete them.

(Adjani is not included in P51 pit. If you want to add a photo you need to modify the first texture in the archive that has 2x2 pixels)

WARNING! Make backup to your own archives when testing.

There is no folder structure saved there... so only people that do know how to mess with them should/could use them so no data loss for everyone else.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v7ztuecanntjz7m/7M6Bpj5eOs?m

Thanks Zaelu I will take a look at them.

So... anyone tested? Or those flickering labels on cockpits are only on few of us?

From what I observe this problem appears only with DDS textures. BMP and TGA are generating mipmaps correctly.

Can someone else confirm?

please?

From what I observe this problem appears only with DDS textures. BMP and TGA are generating mipmaps correctly.

 

Can someone else confirm?

 

please?

BMP and TGA do not have mip maps. only DDS does. im sure thats why we use varying types of DDS. i dont think naming them xxxx.TGA.DDS is doing anything. if it ends ".dds" then its a DDS file

The graphic drivers should make mip maps on the fly but aparently they don't.

mip maps are contained only within the dds file and mainly creatable via nvidia DDs plugins. have you tried saving via nvidia plugins with no mip maps ? and what dxt compression are you saving as ?

my first cockpit mod, it might give help. but it might be out of date too. http://files.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/181207/?sphrase_id=300379

i use a program called dxtbmp to ascertain the file information regards mipmaps and exact file compression type instead of opening with mip maps through nvidia plugins and counting them.

I think you misunderstood me.

I know what is a DDS. As you can see above I recreated the DDS files for cockpits but with Mipmaps for textures that had none. Some of them maybe dont need mipmaps but some do. You can test it if you get in any cockpit and set max zoom out and pan your view slowly. You should see shimmering and other artifacts from resizing of those 2048x2048 textures without filtering. making mipmaps that are filtered solve the proble... when in zoom out you don't see the big texture but a lower indentation of it.

The shimmering effect can be seen in P51 cockpit on the labels with instructions on front panel for example. Or in F15C on almost all of the gauges.

The other part about TGA and BMP was another observation and not question... those textures get mip maps on the fly made by graphic driver in real time... long time ago it was a setting in nvidia drivers that let you choose if you want the video card to make those mipmaps or not. I think now is automatic and works only for BMP and TGA format. For DDS the graphic driver expects mip maps in the file.

That was what I observed and I asked if someone else can confirm not to tell me what are mipmaps ;) .

P.S. It doesn't matter the DXT format... all of them work just fine if you create mipmaps. If you don't create mipmaps... then... no mipmaps are used obviously...

It isn't mipmapping rather Texture aliasing you are seeing I think.

Nate

Yeah... kind of. Technically aliasing refers to edges in 3D objects but antialiasing can be applied to texture also where transparency exists for example.

But mip maping helps solving two issues. One is using a too larger texture for a small objects which would be waste of resources and second is the ugly result a big texture has when it is put on a small object (or a big object viewed from far).

let me give you an example:

Lets say that this picture below is a 800x800 texture on a square object at just the right distance so it fits the screen 1:1... we can clearly see all the details on the texture.

Now lets say that the object gets further away ftom us so the texture is shown half the size. If we use the same big texture it has to get resized down by a factor of two but there are more than one way to do that. One is faster... RESIZE and one is slower but far better in quality... RESAMPLED RESIZE.

Most of the time if a big texture is used for a small object it will go for the faster route and let Anisotropic filtering do the finishing touches but for objects that are facing directly the viewer Anisotropic filtering does nothing. Because there is no anisotropy there most of the times. So that big texture on smaller object (or same object looking smaller because of range/zoom/FOV) will look like this when is half size (400x400 pixels):

See? You can't understand now the details... and for text is even worse when the view pans around like in the cockpit when you constantly move your head... the text gets resized continuously for each frame producing different "textures"... images every time you move you view.

As a result the text is "dancing" and can't be read at all and look ugly and out of "reality".

The other method is to use resampled textures that are far more realistic and produce better quality when filtered with anisotropic filters (if they also get inclined enough). This method also free the graphic card from the job of constantly resizing the big picture as the small picture is usually a mipmap. Here is the same textures at the same 400x400 pixels size but resampled:

As you can see... the text looks better although is not really full visible or readable but the mind perceives it like out of focus which is far more realistic than shimmered and also because you constantly shift your view in cockpit and generally you know what those texts say in full view... you get the feeling of "real" or even "readable" as opposed to the first case where is plain ugly and immersion killer.

Just get in the P51 and zoom out your view... pan slowly right to left and check how the take off and landing checklist text under the gunsight are dancing.

To ease the work of video card... the DDS format have the mip maps of the texture (smaller textures) included in it and they are switched by the video driver automatically.

P.S. I apologize if you knew all this already, but maybe others don't know and they don't know at what too look when I talk about this.

Thanks for that. I always thought Mipmapping was more to do with fixing textures at oblique angles, but your explanation makes it very clear.

How does Anisotropic filtering come into play in your example?

Nate

Exactly where you said :). When angles are oblique.

When the object gets smaller is the job of texturing to make it look good. If a texture needs to be resized down then it should be resampled... it can be done in real time but it is resource consuming so in steps is easier and those steps can be prefabricated in the shape of mipmaps.

When the object gets tilted so the texture (normally squared) gets skewed and looks from viewer as a trapezoid with the small parallel line far... then is the anisotropic filtering job to make it look good and realistic... even there the "stepping" is applicable... old techniques where trilinear and bilinear filtering which meant that instead of computing continuously filtering the graphic card was using 3 or 2 textures for different distances and was overlaping them as needed.

something like this:

:D

the bigger the filter the smoother and sharper looks the texture on the object.

Ok I see how it pieces together now. I'll work out how best to formally report it.

EDIT:- Did I read above that you created a DDS with the correct mipmaps? If so, how would I do something similar?

Nate

yes... I had put a link above in post number 5 so if someone is interested can test them.

here it is again:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v7ztuecanntjz7m/7M6Bpj5eOs?m

I didn't put the entire folder structure as a measure of precaution... this way only people that know what to do can test them so I will not have to deal with complaints about original texture etc... is not a "mod" per se, just a test but, is what I use right now.

P.S. And I would like to repeat myself: Ka50 cockpit is made by RICARDO, I only added few mipmaps on few textures that were missing one. Also many original textures do have mipmaps but not all. And that was my original question why not all? Cause I see mipmaps for "reflexion" textures where it wouldn't matter if the reflexion is or not filtered as it is seen not clear in the output image. And it cannot be because of "resource management" because mipmaps are helping the FPS and they load the memory very little and ease the computations.

P.S.2 And to answer the question. You need to save the original with a dds plugin from nVidia and select create mipmaps... and how many. For Cockpit I used 4 but having more wouldn't matter on the size of the texture as mips get smaller and smaller they get tiny and tinier in size. The only concern is if the graphic card drivers doesn't mistake to put a too small mip on something that is very close because of too much number of them and then the image quality gets altered. But I think I am afraid of nothing here. I never seen mistakes on aircraft skins where there are many mips.

Many thanks.

Nate

thanks for looking into it.

Zaelu, I'd been having a huge problem with flickering cockpit text in the P-51, but am glad to report it's all but gone after applying your fix.

Mulțumesc!

thanks for looking into it.

Formally submitted the issue, many thanks for your help, I've always hated the effect but never understood the underlying cause.

Nate

I am sure that an expert texturer will play with DDS saving settings so he can get maximum quality from mips. I think they could get a bit more sharpening than default settings do. I played a bit with them but I wasn't pleased by my initial results so I reverted to "default"... which is what you see in that link.

I use warm HDR but in cold HDR that little more glow could make it even more "blurry". I didn't test it in that mode.

@Invizibull

cu placere :D

Glad to see a fellow mipper trying to get things done right :)

Zaelu, see if you can get the ABRIS files mipped.

I've been trying but the sim won't display DDS files correctly on the ABRIS.

Location > C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\Mods\aircrafts\Ka-50\Cockpit\Resources\IndicationTextures

All ABRIS files.