[gdal-dev] Does everything have to be separated into bands?

[tasmith3 at rockwellcollins.com]

Hi there,

I am working on software that takes geospatial imagery (usually GeoTIFFs) 
and converts it into textures that are used in our rendering engine.  The 
application also takes terrain files and generates terrain geometry. 

When we process our imagery (RGB), we want to do so on a per pixel basis. 
This means that I don't want to deal with individual color channels, but 
rather the simple RGB buffer itself - much like what the tiff/geotiff 
library gives when calling TIFFReadEncodedTile or TIFFReadEncodedStrip for 
example.  We've only been using the tiff/geotiff libraries up till this 
point, but we need to be able to handle other source file formats too and 
GDAL seemed like it might be the way to go.  The problem is though, that 
if I'm forced to divide my input data into different bands, that's not 
going to work.

Is there a way to get GDAL to give me a buffer of raw pixel data without 
it being separated into individual bands?

If the answer to that question is yes... I'll have some additional 
questions

Thanks,

Todd
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