Automatic tiled EXR cache

[snivlem]

Hi,

I think a very nifty, but very useful feature that was introduced into Maya 2008 Ext2 was the ability for mental ray to automatically create cache .map files into the project directory.

Use optimized textures (auto-conversion)

Enable this option to convert textures in your scene to an optimized format (.map) to increase rendering efficiency. This feature converts all textures referenced in the Maya scene to an optimized file as a pre-render process. The original textures are substituted with the new tileable files during the render process. The file texture nodes in the scene remain untouched and still use the original textures such as bmp and tga.

I've seen that a similar efficient format is used for V-Ray (tiled .exr instead of .map).

I'm not too sure how complicated it is to do this and I know this is not an essential feature or anything but I think it might be a good idea.

[vlado]

Yes, it is a good idea; I'm not quite sure what happens if multiple machines try to render the scene and create the textures though, but I suppose there is a solution for this as well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[snivlem]

Thanks Vlado once again,

I saw your message in the other thread, but I will reply here.

It was never a 100% automatic process with Maya's automatic caching of textures when network rendering. (Probably explains why this option is off by default in Maya prefs - ie this feature is only really meant for local machine rendering).

However Maya's Documentation mentions this:
"If you are using standalone or satellite rendering, converted images must be accessible from every machine. For best performance, it is recommended that you copy the images to every machine."