Resolution of Draped Images in RockPlot3D

[Molly]

A customer recently sent in the following question:

Q: When I drape a tiff image over a 3D model the resolution gets really whacked. It may not look too bad from directly above, but when viewed from an angle it can look pretty ropey. Is there any way to prevent the resolution being too downgraded?

A: There are always going to be degradation of image quality when resampling is involved whether you’re increasing or decreasing the viewed resolution. When the image is loaded into RockPlot3D it first must be resampled if it’s larger than the maximum image size that your OpenGL driver can handle. RockWorks handles that resampling with an algorithm that’s a compromise between speed and quality though the difference in quality is very small. However you can resize your image with the program of your choice. Just check the Help/About dialog in RockPlot3D (the "Max Texture Size") to find out what the maximum size that your OpenGL driver can handle. Keep in mind that the dimensions (length and width) must be a square of 2 (512, 1024, 2048, etc). RockWorks will handle that for you if it needs to with additional resampling.

The second resampling occurs when the image is rendered to the screen by OpenGL. The quality will vary with how much resampling needs to be done and there is nothing you can do to affect the quality of this resampling.

Molly Mayfield

Mitch Wolberg

RockWare Inc