[Bf-committers] A contribution

Dan Brown bf-committers@blender.org
Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:53:42 +0100


TIFF is just a container format, much like a .zip file but not neccesarily 
compressed. It has an internal directory pointing to 'files' inside the tiff, 
and one of these can be a array of 32-bit or 64-bit floats if it is required. 
But it is up to the viewing application as to what it does with those 'files' 
and I couldn't find any mention of any common software using floats or even 
32-bit per component integers for images, only high-end apps like Combustion. If 
we can find specs for a float image file format inside a tiff then it is an 
option, otherwise it would be proprietry to Blender as we would need to know 
where it stores things like width and height of that buffer before other peoples 
software could use it.

There is no reason why a tiff handler couldn't be added to save the depth buffer 
as well/instead of a seperate raw file, like the Iris-zbuf format does now, then 
people have the option to use a straight float/32-bit int file or include it in 
the tiff.

Dan

Jonathan Merritt wrote:

> How about adding support for TIFF images to Blender?  Am I wrong in 
> thinking that TIFF can support color, alpha and depth channels (and 
> others...) simultaneously?  AFAIK, TIFF supports 32- and 64-bit IEEE 
> floating point pixel formats too!
> 
> It just seems a little odd to cobble an extra channel on to an existing 
> image format in a non-standard way like this.
> 
>> Campbell Barton wrote:
>>
>>> I think a 16 bit greyscale PNG would be the go-
>>> Blender can load 16 bt png's (tho only as 8 bits for displaying) so 
>>> it wouldent be odd.
>>> (Blender would be able to read the file it outputted)
>>> - Cam
>>
>>
>