RealView discoveries : custom materials ?

I investigated on how to define custom RealView materials (rubis, sapphire
and other jewelry stuff as well as some watchmakers surface finish
processes)
For each material, there is a .dll in the ./shaders subdir of SW
installation.
Apparently, the .dll combines 2 competing "shaders" technologies:
-NVidia's, based on the Cg (C for graphics) language. (source code in the
../shaders/cg subdir)
-OpenGl 2, based on another language (.frag and .vert source code in the
../shaders/gl2 subdir)
Compilers and other tools are available on the net for both technologies.
Both technologies uses textures defined in the .dds format. You can find
tools on http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html to
read/write those files in PhotoShop or PainShop Pro.
Useful ? Anyone ready to pay for custom RealView materials ?

 

discovered this some time ago. there is a nvidia dds viewer add-in for Win
Explorer. IrfanView will also handle dds

 

You guys are Hardcore.....I am not into computers that much, but it seems
like it would be kewl option that should be placed as an option with in SW
to work with.

 

It is useful, loading a compressed image does not use as much system
resources as loading a bitmap.
The dds format seems to be from B Gates so I would not strange that it will
go the way XML is going.
Why use 2 different types and store it in a dll ?
I have a lot of textures, so I will look in to it and try to convert some
textures.
You can get them for free if you like

Thanks for sharing Philippe

Bert