Hi all,
I just thought I’d ask whether there is an intention for Blender to render to Bitmap.
I’ve always thought of Bitmap to be such a staple format with Jpeg being a compressed format.
Are TGA and PNG also compressed?
Targas can be compressed, but most often are not (they using run length encoding [RLE] like can be done with certain BMPs). The compression is lossless. In my experience, 24-bit TGAs have the same size as 24-bit BMPs (~901 KB at 640x480) and TGAs are better supported throughout different platforms. In my opinion, BMPs are similar to UNIX’s XNM files (X Bitmap, X Pixelmap, etc.) and SGI’s RGB files in that they work well within their designed OS, but don’t often play well with other OS’s.
PNG is an open sourced format designed to replace the GIF format for internet graphics. PNG = Portable Network Graphics
PNGs are compressed.
Regarding BMP vs TGA, targas can support an alpha channel and are a lot more portable than BMPs.
Martin
OK. That’s sufficient information. For some bizarre reason I’d never heard of TGA files before Blender and GIMP. Don’t know why that is - but there you go.
I will render to TGA from now on.
Well… I imagine because several apps use their own formats (I have JASC’s Paint Shop Pro, which by default saves to .psp, which I believe are uncompressed, and include undo information, depending on settings). Much of what comes with Windows uses .bmp. Finally, most images on the web are .gif’s and .jpg’s, for comression… I never see many .bmp’s on the web. It’s most likely that most people using Targa will use that like a “master”, then convert to .jpg to publish on the web, the same in the case of animation, rendering to Targa, then eventually putting it together in a compressed .mpeg for publishing.
Imp