GPU/Procedural Texture Generation
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.
Overview
Procedural texture generation has four stages:
- Noise Module
- Repeat Module
- Base Shape
- F(g) and Lookup Table
Noise Module
This stage applies noise on the input coordinates. Little is known about this other than that there are three noise parameters:
- Turbulence (?)
- Frequency
- Phase
Repeat Module
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 Shape
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:
- ADDSQRT2: sqrt(U’’*U’’+V’’*V’’) (?)
- U’’: U’’ (discards V’’)
- V’’: V’’ (discards U’’)
- MIN: min(U’’,V’’)
- MAX: min(U’’,V’’)
- ADD: U’’+V’’
The output of this function is named "g".
F(g) and Lookup Table
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.