《Atlas Creation Tool》.pdf

Atlas Creation Tool Using the Command-line Tool The Atlas Creation Tool is a command-line tool that accepts a collection of arbitrary textures and packs them into one or more texture atlases. At the end of packing it generates a human-readable texture-atlas index (.tai) file that describes how each original texture maps to an atlas (for example, which atlas file contains the original texture and which sub-rectangle of that atlas it occupies). The .tai file thus allows transforming the original texture-coordinates to texture-coordinates that access the identical data from an atlas. To compare the output of the Atlas Creation Tool—the generated atlases—to the original texture data, you can run the Atlas Comparison Viewer (refer to the Atlas Comparison Viewer User Guide.) Using texture atlases instead of individual textures helps in reducing state changes (SetTexture() in particular), which reduces the number of Draw() calls per frame. Reducing state change and Draw() calls per frame ultimately reduces CPU- utilization caused by driver overhead. The ShaderX3 chapter Improved Batching Via Texture Atlases (also available as the NVIDIA white paper Improved Batching Via Texture Atlases) discusses the theory, benefits, and limitations of texture atlases in more detail. Using the Atlas Creation Tool The Texture Atlas Tool has the following command-line invocation syntax: TextureAtlasTool.exe [-h –help -? -nomipmap –volume -halftexel –width <w> –height <h> –depth <d> -o <filename>] <img1> <img2> ... -h prints this usage help -help prints this usage help -? prints this usage help -nomipmap only writes out the top-level mipmap -volume only valid w/ -nomipmap: make atlases