Vray Large textures workflow?

[vlado]

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.

tx files will only work with VRayHDRI; the 3ds Max Bitmap texture will not load them. maketx is not an Arnold tool; it is a part of the OpenImageIO library.

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!

You are free to use maketx from OpenImageIO, but you will need to use VRayHDRI to load the textures. But even with tiled exr files, there is a handy MaxScript included with V-Ray - see here: http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/V...yHDRIconverter

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?).

No, that would be odd. What was the original file?

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.

Quite a few people have been using tiled images successfully, both .tx/.tex and .exr. However depending on the scenes you might or might not see any improvements. For displacements, quite a lot of RAM is needed for the displacement itself.

Best regrds,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

For displacements, quite a lot of RAM is needed for the displacement itself.

Best regrds,
Vlado

I would mention that, in general 8k textures take a lot of ram. A combination of many 8k maps + displacement is a sure recepie for high ram consumption. As a dynamic memory object you can control the memory through the dynamic memory limit. Perhaps this will make things a bit better with ram.

There is also a way to set separate dynamic texture ram limit (though I don't know how to do it in max).

[vlado]

There is also a way to set separate dynamic texture ram limit (though I don't know how to do it in max).

In Max it's always separate - VRayHDRI has parameters to control the texture cache.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vincit]

Vlado as always thanks for the quick replies,

1 - I understand make tx is a separate tool but i mentioned it because it's intuitive.

2 - Strangely I completely missed that tool (the converter script) it seems like a hidden gem, thanks for the heads up i will look into it, thanks!

3 - I will try to look into this gamma difference and keep you posted when i do, I remember the original textures themselves where 32 bit exr's uncompressed before the conversion.

[zinski]

I know now why it loads so long: it's because i used to show the maps in the viewport so i think it takes a while for the GPU to load all the huge tetxtures. so i will have to live without textures in viewport...

[Vincit]

I know now why it loads so long: it's because i used to show the maps in the viewport so i think it takes a while for the GPU to load all the huge tetxtures. so i will have to live without textures in viewport...

In the slate material editor go to options and uncheck "Enable global rendering" if you want to see a specific texture in the viewport just select that material and click on "show selected material in the viewport" later you can turn it off, this way when you load the scene and open the mat editor max doesn't have to load every single material preview.

Hope this helps,