Hi everyone,
First of all, I want to render an HDR sky. What I'm doing now is transforming this HDRI image into a cubemap, using an external tool, since the common way to display a sky is to do it with a cubemap. Is it the right way ? Or maybe it is common to render a sky dome instead in that case ?
Second, assuming that the HDRI is transformed into a cubemap texture (whether cross, or threw 6 different files), the tools I use allow me to create whether DDS or KTX images in order to preserve all the HDR information. I wanted to use DDS since it seems to be wider supported (is this correct ?). Unfortunately, both Devil and FreeImage fail to load these DDS generated images. I'm planning to try SOIL, but for some reasons I start to believe this will end with the same failure and it would be very frustrating to have 'lost' all this time for nothing. For information Devil reports that the header of the file is wrong and FreeImage simply returns a null pointer without more explanations...
I understand that having my own format might help. But this will imply more works on my side: I'll have to transform the HDRI to a cubemap myself, I'll have to create a new image format myself (which most certainly will look more or less like DDS or KTX), plus I'll have to maintain it and to ensure it will work the same on all the expected supported platforms. Also, my own format won't be optimized for the GC.
Transforming an HDRI into a cubemap might not be that hard, but if I go this way, then I'll have to do the same work for supporting other kind of images too (ie radiance and irradiance). These will require a lot of code, more chance of having errors, and probably a non negligible cost in the accuracy of the result.
So what do you suggest will be best for a single man with only loose-time availabilities ?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I haven't tested KTX yet...
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