Memory - JPG, PNG images - large scene

[tomtnt]

Hi All
We are just doing a large exterior scene. There is a big plane - round 10km x 10km crated by one diffuse texture and one reflection texture, where are just rivers, ponds and small lake. I have a few questions.
If I will save a B/W reflection texture as a JPG, it takes 3,5 MB on HDD. If I save it as a PNG, it takes only 0,8 MB on HDD. The resolution is the same. What is better for Vray if we would like to save some memory? Does Vray convert all images to BMP unconpressed format or will take as is?

The other question is...does it depend on "8bit resolution"? I mean, If i shoud save textures to resolution 4096x4096 or 2048x2048 ...256 x 256 or there is no different for vray?

What kind of geometry format at Vray setting we should use: Dynamic or static? We have Q6600 with 8 Gigs mostly. Render theory is based on direct light + vrayambient light + dirt. There is no GI. A lot of trees, grass via ForestPack Pro 3.6, Still Vray 1.5SP5

Thanks a LOT!
Tomas

[prateekvishwa]

i dont think vray decompress, using lower size image will be good. bigger resolution will be good if camera moving slow & showing texture closely. dynamic should be good if your scene is taking lot of memory, i.e. if you are using vray displacement or very heavy mesh otherwise vray will keep showing 'unloading geometry' message & rendering time will be high.
I m curious to see what are you doing with 10km by 10 km plane good luck & cheers!

[prateekvishwa]

i dont think vray decompress, using lower size image will be good. bigger resolution will be good if camera moving slow & showing texture closely. dynamic should be good if your scene is taking lot of memory, i.e. if you are using vray displacement or very heavy mesh otherwise vray will keep showing 'unloading geometry' message & rendering time will be high.
I m curious to see what are you doing with 10km by 10 km plane good luck & cheers!

[flino2004]

I would go PNG for that but regardless of the format you would need to play with blur filter under materials...you may get white lines around the reflective surfaces. for default is 1.0 below or around .01 would help you(I would do it as well to the diffuse map).
I use "Auto" with memory very close to the limit but if you have problems with memory I remember(no very well) a trick...it's setting the frame buffer in MAX very small so Max doesn't allocate alot memory for that and render I think direct to the drive...search at the forum maybe you' will find it

Fernando

[vlado]

If I will save a B/W reflection texture as a JPG, it takes 3,5 MB on HDD. If I save it as a PNG, it takes only 0,8 MB on HDD. The resolution is the same. What is better for Vray if we would like to save some memory?

Bitmap handling is done by 3ds Max; it decompresses any textures when they are loaded, so a JPG texture will take exactly as much RAM during rendering as the PNG one.

The other question is...does it depend on "8bit resolution"? I mean, If i shoud save textures to resolution 4096x4096 or 2048x2048 ...256 x 256 or there is no different for vray?

Nope, 3ds Max does not need the resolution to be a power of 2.

What kind of geometry format at Vray setting we should use: Dynamic or static? We have Q6600 with 8 Gigs mostly. Render theory is based on direct light + vrayambient light + dirt. There is no GI. A lot of trees, grass via ForestPack Pro 3.6, Still Vray 1.5SP5

This depends; you may have to do some tests. Dynamic geometry will save more RAM but might be slower to render.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Da_elf]

there used to be an image plugin called wav or something like that for huuuuuuuuuuge textures

[Da_elf]

ah ha!! http://www.wavgen.com/

[vlado]

V-Ray can also do this out of the box if you convert the textures to tiled OpenEXR files and use VRayHDRI to load them. It does make the rendering slightly slower though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mcnamex]

V-Ray can also do this out of the box if you convert the textures to tiled OpenEXR files and use VRayHDRI to load them. It does make the rendering slightly slower though.

Best regards,
Vlado

slow but sure just the way i like it ..

[tomtnt]

Thanks all for replies!
It really helped me. So again a bit closer to saint gral

The open EXR wouldn't be best solution for us. Mostly we are seeing whole plane of country in animation...so we would save just a small piece of memory. But thanks! Best Regards Tomas

[super gnu]

im still confused about tiled exrs though.. the sizes (on disk) are HUGE. like 400 meg for an 8k x 8k texture. im assuming that it never loads this much data, and when distant (showing whole texture) it will load a lower res version? you only get full res on the parts that are closer to camera?

i understand if only part of texture is in view it will only load the relevant tiles, but what is the behaviour when viewing whole tex, but from a distance?

basically in my tests with a single 8kx8k tex in a scene, it rendered faster, and used less ram, using jpeg. which begs the question, when do i see a benefit from tiled exrs? its been suggested to me that the benefits only become obvious when at the ram limit, and below that it will always load the full res tex, but this makes no sense to me? would mean different res textures would be used in machines with different amounts of ram..?!?

i think one of the big limitations of tiled exrs is the lack of support for 8 bit textures. might even be the whole issue im having.. going from an 8 bit jpeg to a 16 bit exr is just eating my ram.

[vlado]

im still confused about tiled exrs though.. the sizes (on disk) are HUGE. like 400 meg for an 8k x 8k texture. im assuming that it never loads this much data, and when distant (showing whole texture) it will load a lower res version? you only get full res on the parts that are closer to camera?

Yes, this is correct.

i understand if only part of texture is in view it will only load the relevant tiles, but what is the behaviour when viewing whole tex, but from a distance?

In that case only a lower mip-map resolution level will be loaded, not the full res texture.

i think one of the big limitations of tiled exrs is the lack of support for 8 bit textures. might even be the whole issue im having.. going from an 8 bit jpeg to a 16 bit exr is just eating my ram.

That, and also the fact the V-Ray internally stores them as 32-bit floating point when loaded in memory. We still have some more work to do in that regard.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

in that case, are there any similar methods available when dealing with lots of very high res. 8 bit textures? if above is correct then ill never get a benefit from tiled exr's if the source is 8 bit...