Is there a fast alternative to creating a Texture2D from a Bitmap object in XNA?

Question

I've looked around a lot and the only methods I've found for creating a Texture2D from a Bitmap are:

using  (MemoryStream s = new  MemoryStream())
{
   bmp.Save(s, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png);
   s.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
   Texture2D tx = Texture2D.FromFile(device, s);
}

and

Texture2D tx = new Texture2D(device, bmp.Width, bmp.Height,
                        0, TextureUsage.None, SurfaceFormat.Color);
tx.SetData<byte>(rgbValues, 0, rgbValues.Length, SetDataOptions.NoOverwrite);

Where rgbValues is a byte array containing the bitmap's pixel data in 32-bit ARGB format.

My question is, are there any faster approaches that I can try?

I am writing a map editor which has to read in custom-format images (map tiles) and convert them into Texture2D textures to display. The previous version of the editor, which was a C++ implementation, converted the images first into bitmaps and then into textures to be drawn using DirectX. I have attempted the same approach here, however both of the above approaches are significantly too slow. To load into memory all of the textures required for a map takes for the first approach ~250 seconds and for the second approach ~110 seconds on a reasonable spec computer (for comparison, C++ code took approximately 5 seconds). If there is a method to edit the data of a texture directly (such as with the Bitmap class's LockBits method) then I would be able to convert the custom-format images straight into a Texture2D and hopefully save processing time.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

You want LockBits? You get LockBits.

In my implementation I passed in the GraphicsDevice from the caller so I could make this method generic and static.

public static Texture2D GetTexture2DFromBitmap(GraphicsDevice device, Bitmap bitmap)
{
    Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(device, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height, 1, TextureUsage.None, SurfaceFormat.Color);

    BitmapData data = bitmap.LockBits(new System.Drawing.Rectangle(0, 0, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height), System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, bitmap.PixelFormat);

    int bufferSize = data.Height * data.Stride;

    //create data buffer 
    byte[] bytes = new byte[bufferSize];    

    // copy bitmap data into buffer
    Marshal.Copy(data.Scan0, bytes, 0, bytes.Length);

    // copy our buffer to the texture
    tex.SetData(bytes);

    // unlock the bitmap data
    bitmap.UnlockBits(data);

    return tex;
}

Answer 2

I found I had to specify the PixelFormat as .Format32bppArgb when using LockBits as you suggest to grab webcam images.

        BitmapData bmd = bmp.LockBits(new System.Drawing.Rectangle(0, 0, bmp.Width, bmp.Height),
            System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
        int bufferSize = bmd.Height * bmd.Stride;
        //create data buffer 
        byte[] bytes = new byte[bufferSize];
        // copy bitmap data into buffer
        Marshal.Copy(bmd.Scan0, bytes, 0, bytes.Length);

        // copy our buffer to the texture
        Texture2D t2d = new Texture2D(_graphics.GraphicsDevice, bmp.Width, bmp.Height, 1, TextureUsage.None, SurfaceFormat.Color);
        t2d.SetData<byte>(bytes);
        // unlock the bitmap data
        bmp.UnlockBits(bmd);
        return t2d;