Texture caching/tiling

[remydrh]

I am curious about whether or not Vray has a feature for texture caching/tiling. OpenEXR supports this behavior but I do not know if Vray takes advantage of it. I have a scene with quite a few large textures for large scale rendering (film and print).

I notice there are other selections in 3ds Max 2009 for textures too. Mipmapping would be helpful as well.

I am familiar with how Renderman and mental ray handle mipmapping and texture tiling but I haven't been able to find an equivalent in Vray, can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

(Vray 1.5 SP2)

[dbuchhofer]

I'm definitely interested in this also, or really any sort of texture LOD.. Mip mapping has its own set of fun issues, from what I've seen/read the limitation is in max's bitmap filtering options, or lack there of.

[vlado]

V-Ray Standalone and V-Ray for Maya can take advantage of tiled OpenEXR and .vrimg files. In 3ds Max, V-Ray uses the 3ds Max bitmap handling (as does mental ray by default). If you have the Bitmap pager enabled, then 3ds Max will be able to page large textures to disk, although I do not know if it does so in tiles or in scanlines.

Best regards,
Vlado

[remydrh]

Is there a utility hiding somewhere to create a mipmap file Vray recognizes? The memory consumption for the scene makes rendering with Vray exceptionally slow and the filtering for the textures is poor. The pipeline is linear so texture files are 16 bit half. This means the files are already larger than usual for rendering.

Support for this in the future would be nice or some additional texture filtering options to reduce noise without having to sample more.

Any advice on a workaround would be exceptionally helpful. I see some tips we're trying and if something works well I'll post it in here.

[Morbid Angel]

so if you load all textures as .vrimg into 3ds max directly they will not flush during render if the bitmap pages is turned off?

[dbuchhofer]

Also maybe look at DDS files, can write the mips into them, but you'd probably need to write your own linearMipAniso filter, which is fairly annoying, (Unless maybe thats not too much of a stretch to expand the VrayBmpFilter?)

[remydrh]

For now we managed to use smaller files (was tiff now png) and ditched the summed area filter that performed well but ate too much memory. vrimg is probably fine except that the textures fill the screen in many cases so if it was tiling I could pull a section of the mipmap instead of the whole 8k. Will vrimg cache like that?

We might try our own implementation of mipmapping if it comes to it but this seems to work well for now. One of our developers is looking into extending a few things with the SDK soon.

[RErender]

Have you looked at Wavgen?
http://www.wavgen.com/download.html

I haven't used it but it has been around for many years, uses wavelet tech.

[mcnamex]

the only issue with wavgen is the license is per node basis, so if you require to use 100 machines you would need to purchase 100 render licenses

i havent try it tho