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How to: Export a Texture that Contains Mipmaps

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This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

The Image Content Pipeline can generate mipmaps from a source image as part of your project's build phase. When you do not need to specify the image content of each MIP level manually—as you might do to achieve certain effects—generating mipmaps at build time ensures that mipmap contents never become out-of-sync and eliminates the performance cost of generating mipmaps at run time.

This document demonstrates these activities:

  • Configuring the source image to be processed by the Image Content Pipeline.

  • Configuring the Image Content Pipeline to generate mipmaps.

Exporting Mipmaps

Mipmapping provides automatic screen-space Level-of-Detail for textured surfaces in a 3D game or app. It enhances the rendering performance of a game or app by pre-computing down-sampled versions of a texture so that the entire texture does not have to be down-sampled each time it is sampled.

To export a texture that has mipmaps

  1. Begin with a basic texture. Load an existing image file, or create one as described in How to: Create a Basic Texture. To support mipmaps, specify a texture that has a width and height that are both the same power of two in size, for example, 64x64, 256x256, or 512x512.

  2. Configure the texture file you just created so that it’s processed by the Image Content Pipeline. In Solution Explorer, open the shortcut menu for the texture file you just created and then choose Properties. On the Configuration Properties, General page, set the Item Type property to Image Content Pipeline. Make sure that the Content property is set to Yes and Exclude From Build is set to No, and then choose the Apply button. The Image Content Pipeline configuration property page appears.

  3. Configure the Image Content Pipeline to generate mipmaps. On the Configuration Properties, Image Content Pipeline, General page, set the Generate Mips property to Yes (/generatemips).

  4. Choose the OK button.

    When you build the project, the Image Content Pipeline converts the source image from the working format to the output format that you specified, including MIP levels, and the result is copied to the project’s output directory.