Vray Large textures workflow?

[Vincit]

Hello all,

I would like to ask about the general workflow in vray and 3ds max with very large textures such as multiple 32 bit 8k exr's, for example to be used many times with blend shapes alongside driven materials for animated characters.

When we were working with Arnold in Maya we used to convert all textures to .tx format this not only made the renders super fast with large textures but it also managed memory very well by splitting the textures into many smaller buckets, later we only had to load the tx textures into Maya and work with it disregarding the original exrs, there was also a nice tool which converted all assigned textures in the scene to .tx files automatically and replaced them avoiding manual work.

The question is: How is the .tx workflow inside vray? does it work the same way, as in does it use .tx just as well to manage memory and speed such as that of Arnold? were can we find the converters for it and are there any tutorials out there regarding this matter?

Thank you!

[Pixelcon]

There is a tiled EXR tool that comes with vray allowing you to convert textures into Tiled EXRs that can be loaded via the vrayHDRI loader. Vray will only load and use the texture resolution needed at render time. Dont know if this is the information you're after...

http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/V...nEXR+Converter

[vlado]

I would like to ask about the general workflow in vray and 3ds max with very large textures such as multiple 32 bit 8k exr's, for example to be used many times with blend shapes alongside driven materials for animated characters. The question is: How is the .tx workflow inside vray? does it work the same way, as in does it use .tx just as well to manage memory and speed such as that of Arnold? were can we find the converters for it and are there any tutorials out there regarding this matter?

Check out this page:
http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/V...XRandTIFFFiles

You can either use maketx, exactly like you did before, or you can use the img2tiledexr - however, as pointed out in the docs page, .tx files tend to be smaller and more memory efficient.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vincit]

Thank you both for your time! we will check them out.

Best regards,

[stevesideas]

On the same subject. I've just loaded a very large jpg into the vrayHDRI map slot. Is this not the best way to do this then ? I would have to convert first ?

[vlado]

On the same subject. I've just loaded a very large jpg into the vrayHDRI map slot. Is this not the best way to do this then ? I would have to convert first ?

It depends; if you can live with a bit longer load time for the texture and you have enough RAM, there's no reason to convert.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vincit]

Hi Steve,

It really depends, on just a handful of large textures it wont make much of a difference however many high res and very large files ideally it would yes especially 32 bit or 16 bit tiff or exrs, we are still going to test out vray's approach on this but from our experience having textures converted to tx was invaluable in our feature production pipeline.

Strange to have a jpeg in the HDRImap : )

Also looking forward to experiment with tiled exrs.

Best regards,

[vlado]

Also looking forward to experiment with tiled exrs.

Make sure you test .tx files as well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vincit]

Thanks Vlado Will do ofcourse!

[zinski]

Hello there,

I read the threads but it is still unclear to me:

I will have huge scenes with much geometry, and many high res textures.
At the moment I'm planning the general texture workflow:

should i choose

a) convert all textures to tiled exr's and use Vray HDRI map (it renders fast, but it takes long to load the scene and needs more RAM to load the scene)
A jpeg texture of about 5 mb has after the conversion to tiled exr about 40mb! If i have hundreds of them this will make a huge difference!

b) use jpeg textures in common bitmap map (less big files, shorter time to load the scene, a little slower rendering)

c) use jpg textures in Vray HDRI Map ?! (slow files, faster rendering?!)

with best regards,

Florian

[Vizioen]

Hello there,

I read the threads but it is still unclear to me:

I will have huge scenes with much geometry, and many high res textures.
At the moment I'm planning the general texture workflow:

should i choose

a) convert all textures to tiled exr's and use Vray HDRI map (it renders fast, but it takes long to load the scene and needs more RAM to load the scene)
A jpeg texture of about 5 mb has after the conversion to tiled exr about 40mb! If i have hundreds of them this will make a huge difference!

b) use jpeg textures in common bitmap map (less big files, shorter time to load the scene, a little slower rendering)

c) use jpg textures in Vray HDRI Map ?! (slow files, faster rendering?!)

with best regards,

Florian

I too am wondering about that. Also if you're using around 30 x 4K PNG textures, should those be converted? I always use the regular bitmap of 3dsmax. Is it better to use the vrayhdriloader for any type of bitmap?

[vlado]

a) convert all textures to tiled exr's and use Vray HDRI map (it renders fast, but it takes long to load the scene and needs more RAM to load the scene)

Why would it take a long time to load the scene? Because of the asset tracker name resolution or something else?

A jpeg texture of about 5 mb has after the conversion to tiled exr about 40mb! If i have hundreds of them this will make a huge difference!

Only in disk space, not actual RAM usage. RAM usage will generally be lower.

b) use jpeg textures in common bitmap map (less big files, shorter time to load the scene, a little slower rendering)

Sounds like more trouble to me.

c) use jpg textures in Vray HDRI Map ?! (slow files, faster rendering?!)

You can do this, but I'm not sure it will render any faster.

Best regards,
Vlado

[zinski]

Why would it take a long time to load the scene? Because of the asset tracker name resolution or something else?

Since it is not because of the tiled .exr files, good question!
what means asset tracker name resolution? I know the asset tracker, but not what you mean with name resolution.

Thanks anyway,

regards,

Zinski

[vlado]

what means asset tracker name resolution? I know the asset tracker, but not what you mean with name resolution.

When you load a scene, 3ds Max checks if it can find all the assets needed for the scene (textures, proxies etc) and if not - displays the Missing Files dialog. If the textures cannot be found in the place specified by the file names, 3ds Max tries to find them in the various texture paths and project folders. Sometimes this bit may take quite a bit of time.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vincit]

I have been testing these methods out during spare time but stopped for a while due to tight schedules, so far here's what I have gathered.

1 - converting to .tx file has been a pain, it requires an external software but that was a bit of a hassle to go through and time didn't allow so we dropped it for now, for the sake of quick experimentation i tried the excellent arnold tx converter in maya and output the textures that way, but strangely max/vray did not recognize those files, so I switched to tiled exr.

2 - tiled exr worked, although in large production scenes i still see the method of converting to tiled exr and reapplying the textures on complicated shader networks with the current workflow as non practical especially when you have hundreds of textures, something like arnolds tx converter /manager within max would do great!

3 - Tiled exr on 32 bit as well as 16 bit produced slightly different gamma results vs the original texture file, this was critical and gave us a pause, ( can someone shed light on this?).

4 - so far from the current tests no significant gain in speed, ram usage varied but still being tested on more complex scenes.

from our side It's still a little bit confusing regarding its pros and cons when it comes to vray , Vray is so far crunching through the scenes but it does suffer on displacements with many 8K 32 bit maps with rams over flooding, we hoped to test the tiled exrs here in the hopes to optimize things for the engine, I will also try to look into the tx converter but the workflow regarding these converters is so spread out that its a little discouraging and time consuming method, its when custom tools creation become necessary.