Most memory efficient texture format?

[duke2]

I usually use png's, but for this epic aerial photo I have, is there any benefit using either vrimg or exr with its tiled format? Are the tiles loaded only if needed or anything fancy like that?

[vlado]

In 3ds Max, it does not matter - all textures are converted to full size once they are loaded.

We are working on adding support for true tiled textures inside VRayHDRI map, but this is not as of yet implemented.

Best regards,
Vlado

[duke2]

Cool! Here's some reading material if you haven't seen it already:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/36400144...Texture-Topics

[thablanch]

In 3ds Max, it does not matter - all textures are converted to full size once they are loaded.

Now I'm going to say something different than Vlado, so I feel bad already....

Mabee in the 3dsMax process it is the same, but it loads the memory in a different way.
A few years back, I had a huge Hotel with hundreds of .tif files ( I was using tif for the layers versatility and the back and forward Max-Photoshop.)

I was on 32 bits, 3GB switch, and it kept crashing.. I converted every .tif to .jpg, and the render went through. After that, I looked at the memory used, and Max was using more memory on the scene with .tif than on the scene with .jpg.
The pixel format size was the same, but the over all Megs weight was different, and in my case the difference between rendering and crashing...

Now that we are all ( or nearly all, I guess) on 64 bits, I do not convert anymore, but to the original question, yes, some formats are more memory efficient.

[vlado]

3ds Max will respect the bit-ness of the images, so if the TIFF images were 32-bit or 16-bit, they would take more memory than an 8-bit JPG image. But other than that, there is no difference between e.g. 8-bit PNG, 8-bit JPG and so on.

Best regards,
Vlado