The 3DS GPU supports procedural generation of texture data using texture unit 3. Little is known about this feature, albeit a few public hints have been dropped. The contents of this page are solely based on reports on a presentation given by DMP.
The related GPU registers can be found starting here.
OverviewEdit
Procedural texture generation has four stages:
- Noise Module (outputs u′,v′)
- Repeat Module (outputs u′′,v′′)
- Base Shape (also notated as G(u′′,v′′), output g)
- F(g) and Lookup Table
Noise ModuleEdit
This stage applies noise on the input coordinates. Little is known about this other than that there are three noise parameters:
- Amplitude
- Frequency
- Phase
These parameters are configured starting here.
Repeat ModuleEdit
This stage performs basic texture coordinate wrapping on the noised coordinates. It supports symmetric and mirrored wrapping. They don't seem to be configurable beyond that.
Base ShapeEdit
The U’’ and V’’ coordinates are used to generate a scalar value in the range [0;1] from the wrapped coordinates using one of six functions documented here.
The output of this function is named "g".
F(g) and Lookup TableEdit
F is a selectable function which transforms g to another scalar value. There are two known options for F:
- the identity function
- a triangle function
The final texel color is determined by using the value of F(g) as an index into a configurable lookup table.