Background: I've been updating the paint jobs of my stock car with the impending change to DX11. One of the special paint schemes is the chrome illusion look. I wanted to take a look at the original chrome illusion car created for N2xxx way back in the day by White Falcon (I think). The result can be found at The US Pits. A look at the car showed that it used five or six mip-map levels for the effect. This is slightly different than the method I used in DDS_Cheap_Builder-- four in rotation. My first thought was to modify DDS_Cheap_Builder (DDS_Cheap_Builder download available in this thread) . I searched for the source to DDS_Cheap_Builder, but could not find it. There is a missing four year period of programs that I can't find-- circa 2006-2009. DDS_C_B and a 3D live drive view of N2003 PTF and LP files are the two highlights of that era. I wanted to expand on the 3D program, but, oh well. My work with Blender kind of took it's place, anyway. I did find my old chrome illusion builder for GPL, though. That one allowed you to view and control each and every mip-map level of both the source and destination graphics. So, late last week, I got the idea to do a new version for rFactor2-- or any program using 2048 x 2048 type DXT5 DDS's for graphics. About the program: There is a source side and a destination side to the program. The graphic is in the middle. The graphic is 512 x 512, stretched. So only that resolution mip-map level looks good. 1024 and 2048 levels are compressed, <512 levels are stretched. Since there are twelve mip-map levels, you can load up to twelve source DDS's. Though in practicality only five or six would be the limit. Once you get down to a 32 ^ 2 (or maybe 64 ^ 2) bit map, the object is so far away, what detail would you see? The program starts by creating thirteen plain black DDS's-- twelve for sources and one for destination. It reminds you that you need to load at least one DDS. You can view selected Source DDS's and mip-map levels and Destination DDS mip-map levels by clicking the inside any of the three RadioButtonGroups. "Transfer from Source to Destination" will copy the selected source DDS mip-map level to the same level of the destination mip-map and automatically display the Destination mip-map level. When you are happy with the Destination DDS, the "Save" button can be clicked. There are some tracking variables that are used to help provide information. The information line is above the graphic. It will tell you the name of a Source DDS or whether data has been transferred to a particular mip-map level of the Destination DDS, for example. The form cannot be resized. There is some small level of file checking involved to try to ensure a 2048 x 2048 type DXT5 DDS is loaded. First is the file size. If that matches the expected value then the file is loaded. After it is loaded, then values of 2048, 2048 and "DXT5" are looked for in the expected locations. If any of the checks fail, then a message about the wrong DDS is displayed. A successful load will be viewed. Transparency/Alpha is not shown as part of the display-- only the RGB values. A data block copied from Source to Destination will contain the A data, as the mip-map block is copied. The program does not create the DDS data. It only shows it. Chrome Illusion Builder direct download link.
