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Procedural Texture Toolkit v0.1
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  Content of this file:

  1. Introduction
  2. Using the editor
  3. Using the generator
  4. Compiling the editor
  5. License
  6. Contact

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1. Introduction
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Procedural textures save storage space by saving the instructions of how 
to create a texture rather than the raw texture data itself. Using this 
method you can create hundreds of megabytes of textures from just a couple
of kilobytes of data.

Of course, this comes at a cost. Firstly the textures can't just be dumped
into memory - they take a long time to load because they must be created 
before being used. Secondly you have to use a special editor that looks 
and acts nothing like Photoshop or GIMP, and your artists need to learn 
how to use it. For these reasons, procedural texturing is something that 
is reserved for tech demos and rarely used in modern games. Besides, DVDs
have gigabytes of space to fill with junk.. erm I mean *assets*. 

Well, I'm no artist and I'd like to make the textures for my games in a 
procedural manner because it will be more fun than making them by hand.

Plus they'll be small, incredibly small.

Disclaimer:

This isn't supposed to compete with demoscene procedural texture tools 
like .werkkzeug, as Irrlicht takes up about half a megabyte of space 
anyway. I'm not banking on it being fast either.. My original idea was
to have the installer unpack the textures to disk, but I decided to 
process the textures on the GPU which might be fast enough for my needs.

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2. Using the editor
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You don't, it isn't finished yet

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3. Using the generator
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Link all the files in /generator/ and create an instance of 
CProceduralTextureGenerator. You can then load texture and project files 
created by the editor.
To load a texture from a project simply use 
  driver->getTexture("project.proctex#texturename");

Notes:

The first time a project file is accessed like this every texture from
the project will be added to the texture cache, which may take some time.

Procedural textures only work with the hardware drivers at present, so
you can't use them in software mode (yet).

If you try to load an image, you'll get a blank one and the textures will 
end up in the texture cache.


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4. Compiling the editor
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Stick it in irrlict/trunk/examples/proctex and click the VC9 project file.
It will include a few files from the GUI editor which I'm not maintaining
a list of at the moment.

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5. License
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Copyright (c) 2009 Gareth Davidson

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

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6. Contact
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Suggestion? Patch? Feedback? Contact gaz@bitplane.net


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7. Credits
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Gaz Davidson     - author
ATI RenderMonkey - lots of useful shaders
.theprodukkt     - inspiration