Large Texture Maps

[glorybound]

I remember seeing a script that will warn you of large texture maps in your scene, but I can't find it. Does anybody remember this?

[theedge]

Take a look at this script : http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sc...cking-resizing
It can sort all your bitmaps by size and even convert and resize them directly.
I bought it only a few days ago and it works nicely.

[glorybound]

Awesome, I'll try it, Thanks!

[joconnell]

If you've got huge images that you use often, the convert to multi res exr tool is great. If you have an 8000 pixel map for example, it'll convert it into one file that contains the 8k map, a 4k, a 2k, a 1k and 512px version, then vray through the vray hdri map will pick whichever one is good enough for different distances in your image - you get automatic quality and memory overheads balanced.

[glorybound]

If you've got huge images that you use often, the convert to multi res exr tool is great. If you have an 8000 pixel map for example, it'll convert it into one file that contains the 8k map, a 4k, a 2k, a 1k and 512px version, then vray through the vray hdri map will pick whichever one is good enough for different distances in your image - you get automatic quality and memory overheads balanced.

this scene is fine; I was trouble shooting long render times, but I'll keep this in mind.

[3LP]

If you've got huge images that you use often, the convert to multi res exr tool is great. If you have an 8000 pixel map for example, it'll convert it into one file that contains the 8k map, a 4k, a 2k, a 1k and 512px version, then vray through the vray hdri map will pick whichever one is good enough for different distances in your image - you get automatic quality and memory overheads balanced.

Nice! Didn't knew that!
Thanks for the explanation!

Stan

[Joelaff]

Note that using the EXR format for your tiled EXRs always converts your textures to 16 or 32 bit float. This is ideal if you have float textures (with values outside of the 0-1 or 0-255 range). If your textures are 8 bit, like JPEG, TGA, most PNGs, etc. then you are better off using the maketx tool (google it) to create tiled TIFF files. These will be 8 bits per channel, and offer the same utility as tiled EXR files, but use half the memory per tile. Maketx can also make integer format 16 bit tiled textures. Note that, although his typically isn't much of an issu,e INT16 has ~65k grey levels per channel, whereas float 16 has only ~8k grey levels per channel in the 0-1.0 range (and they are not evenly distributed either). Thus converting your 16bit INT images to 16 bit float is slightly suboptimal (though you would have a lot of trouble seeing a difference in most cases). Floating point numbers are also slower to process (especially half float that typically is converted to 32float internally for processing, and then back).

In order to take advantage of the tile capabilities you must use VRayHDRI nodes to load your textures. Bitmap nodes will load the entire texture into to RAM like normal (and won't even load tiled TIFF files, which are typically .tx).

Note also that tiled EXRs and TIFFs have slightly different image filtering than the default MIP mapping. So be sure to test them for your purposes. For the most part they are better than the defaults, but not as good as Elliptical filtering. If you disable image filtering with tiled images VRayHDRI will be forced to load the entire texture into RAM anyway. So that would be useless (and don't do that anyway). Same holds true if you disable filtering for GI. Then the entire texturemap will be loaded into RAM.

Using tiled textures where the textures are stored over a network can cause slowdowns depending on your scene (sometimes severe). We mirror our tiled tetxures locally to each render machine.

I was working with Pixamoon, the author of the script abov,e to get the maketx options set up in his script. It should help make maketx easier to use (it is command line normally).

[joconnell]

Awesome info Joe - whereabouts are you working at the minute?