Texture atlas


In computer graphics, a texture atlas is an image containing multiple smaller images, usually packed together to reduce overall dimensions. An atlas can consist of uniformly-sized images or images of varying dimensions. A sub-image is drawn using custom texture coordinates to pick it out of the atlas.

Benefits

In an application where many small textures are used frequently, it is often more efficient to store the textures in a texture atlas which is treated as a single unit by the graphics hardware. This reduces both the disk I/O overhead and the overhead of a context switch by increasing memory locality. Careful alignment may be needed to avoid bleeding between sub textures when used with mipmapping and texture compression.
In web development, images are packed into a sprite sheet to reduce the number of image resources that need to be fetched in order to display a page.

Explanations and algorithms

  • - A whitepaper by NVIDIA which explains the technique.
  • - A guide on using a texture atlas.
  • - Review and benchmark of the different packing algorithms
  • - Funny video explaining the benefits of using sprite sheets
  • - Blog post that explain atlas textures and their usage areas

    Tools

  • - sprite sheet packer with graphical user interface and tons of options. Works with almost all game engines.
  • - Open source texture packer utility from libGDX
  • - Open source texture atlas utility for 2D OpenGL games.
  • - Open source texture atlas utility including an Apache Ant task.
  • - Copyright-free atlas texture library
  • - simple Free and Open Source atlas packer with multiple options
Category:3D rendering
Category:Computer graphics