I’ve written a small dotnet dll for a client to be used from within max that does some quick and specific image processing based off the bitmapTextures in the scene. It all works perfectly, I’m just stuck on 1 tiny thing. Once processed, I need to save each image as a greyscale tif (8bits per pixel as opposed to 8 bits per channel) and I can’t seem to find a way to do this – Maybe i’m not looking hard enough…
are you saving from .NET itself, or copying the bitmap back into max prior to saving?
If the latter, have a peek at the iTifIO interface (or just plain TIF interface). Specifically:
TIF.setType #mono
-- save bitmap to .tif here
If the former – would depend on whatever library is being used to save to .TIF and whether or not that exposes greyscale at all. I know Windows has -some- TIF support to deal with the fax thing, but I’m not sure if that means it’s exposed
Edit: For .NET: Looks like you’d have to construct a bitmap with the appropriate pixelformat class before saving. However, I’m only seeing a 16bpp grayscale format.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.imaging.pixelformat.aspx
Thanks for the speedy response
I’m saving from .NET
16bpp might be ok. I’m trying it out now and for some reason i’m getting ‘dotnet out of memory’ errors when i try to use bitmap.clone rect pixelformat.16bppGrayScale method…
i’ll try using a graphics object to ‘draw’ it into a new bitmap instead
EDIT: still getting that out of memory error… seems to be having trouble creating the bitmap for some reason unknown to me
could be a disposal issue joel, take a look at this article –
After some Googling about*… it seems like that format is poorly supported, if at all. So back to finding a LIB that supports TIFF saving with parameters (as opposed to having to construct a new bitmap with the given pixel format), methinks :\
Hey Pete
Thanks for the info, I’ve tried using Dispose but its still not working. That GDI+ FAQ site may come in handy though. Richard’s link about the 16bppgrayscale format not being supported very well seems to have hit the nail on the head unfortunately. I guess i’ll have to figure out some crazy work around.
ok i have a workaround however it requires the brilliant (and free!) LEAD Tools command line image convertion utility. I was going to be using this anyway because the tif files were to be converted to SGI RGB format (.rgb) and i discovered that it has a switch for bpp. so from max i can just use:
HiddenDOSCommand "LFC <sourceDir | sourceFile> <targetDir> /F=FILE_SGI /B8 /NOUI"
the /B8 part is the bpp conversion.
You can download LFC from here
obviously this workaround adds an external dependency but its fine in my case since the client already uses it. Ideally i would have used a dotnet compatible codec for .rgb but i haven’t been able to find one and i have no idea where to start to write one.