texture size Vs RAM needed

[lander]

I'm considering baking the textures of this environment to speed up the rendering of future animations. But I'm not sure of how big I can make the textures and how it will effect the ability to render.

If I bake the textures of a building at 2k and the resulting file size is 2Mb. Will that texture then need 2Mb of RAM at rendertime? And can I from that estimate the amount of needed RAM to render the final cene? Or are there other parameters to this?

After baking the textures I'll export the mesh as Vray proxy and render the scene without GI.

As you can see in the image there are quite alot of objects and there is more to come.


Is there anything else I should take into consideration when it comes to this solution?

-lander

[jacksc02]

I havent got an answer to your problem, but the render is cool!

[TomC]

Ram usage in max :

Bitmaps in max :
height x width x color depth (so 24bit requires 3 bytes/pixel)

Bitmap filtering :
height x width x 1 byte for Pyramidal or 12 bytes for Summed Area

Example :
a 2000x2000 bitmap in Pyramidal Filtering would give this result in RAM usage :

(2000x2000x3)+(2000x2000x1)=16 x 10^6 bytes = 16MB

I think this should help you out.

Cheers,
Tom

[rpc212]

I haven't got an answer either, but had to say that is a very nice peice of work you have there! I really like it alot!

[lander]

Thanks.
I have been dodging this project for quite some time now.

Hmm maybe it's time to roll up my sleeve.

-C