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Is BC4 good for distance field compression? Analysis follows...

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from what I know: no.

@sjb3d

has played w it if I remember right.

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and

We switched from BC4 to U8 to be able to render bricks directly. Need the precision for normals but also to keep shared texels identical for neighbouring bricks (we store 8^3 voxel corners to render 7^3 volume).

12:18 PM · Oct 17, 2020Twitter for Android

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and

Yeah. In Claybook we also used u8. Implicit normals need the extra precision. High quality normals were one of the reasons we needed 32x sub-voxel precision (thus max step distance was +-4 voxels). But it wasn't a problem with our multilevel trace algorithm.

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and

So you used 8x8x8 tiles in volume texture, each representing 7x7x7 area (with single side borders)? How do you mipmap this? This is a now pow2 tile size. 9x9x9 tiles that represent 8x8x8 regions align perfectly to upper/lower mip level tiles.

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and

Yep texels are duplicated on all shared faces. Not sure what you mean about mip maps, bricks form an octree for level of detail, each octree node is 7 texels long, octree node corners line up with texel centres at all levels (so need 8^3 storage for each).

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