Limitations with Texture Sizes?

[ValeroStudio]

So whats the cutout with Vr4Su and texture map sizes? I have noticed if I use a jpeg larger than 1500 pixels things really really (I mean reallllly) slow down at render time. I have bought a few Arrowway textures and those things are monsters (6000 x 4500) and I was wondering how low I should resize them. I dont want to lose too much quality.

[deanfitton]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

there is a nice little trick for this.

1, Take your texture in PS and resize it to something considerably smaller. If you have an arroway texture for example at 6000px wide then resize to 1000px. Save this file as a jpg (compression helps bring the file size down) rather then png.
2. Import this low res texture into SU and texture everything accordingly.
3. MATERIAL EDITOR now select the material you have just imported, and create ANOTHER diffuse layer.
4. This layer should now be BELOW your diffuse layer with the low res texture already assigned.
5. Now assign the HIGH res texture to the new diffuse layer
6. Go to the diffuse layer where LOW res texture is assigned, and click on the [m] next to transparency, set this to aColor and set the colour to TOTAL WHITE
7. RENDER, you should see your nice high res texture instead of the low res in the render, if you save your SU file, you will see the file size remains low and SU handles perfectly.

This process just tricks SU into having a low res image to preview what your doing, the aColor means that vray ignores that diffuse layer and uses the diffuse layer below, and because that diffuse layer is below the other SU never embeds it, which is what leads to poor usability and high file sizes.

Kind Regards

[andybot_cg]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

hey dean - thanks for pointing that out - about using the aColor adjustment instead of the transparency color (like in this post ) I totally missed it before and just changed my SU style to no transparency... :-[

[deanfitton]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

no worries...

i picked it up from either fernando or dkenig!

its really useful

[ValeroStudio]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

Thank you for the tip. My understanding though was that Vr4SU did not like to process large images. I remember Fernando mentioning this a few tutorials ago. When I have large textures in my model and render, I notice rendering times are like 5x longer than if I used a smaller res texture. I was wondering what the max texture size you should use generally.

[ValeroStudio]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

I just did a little test. I had a simple 15'x15' plane with an Arroway texture applied. I ran one render (default settings) with the full texture are 6,000 pixels wide using the technique mentioned above, and then ran one using just the 1000 pixel texture as the diffuse. The larger texture rendering was 21 seconds longer. I would imagine this can really add up on a complicated model using a bunch of high res textures. Should your render times increase that much because of a high-texture map? Seems like a bug. Doesn't the mip map filter have something to do with resampling a texture for the resolution needed for the rendering output? As a side note, I used the full res textures on both test in the bump and reflection maps.

[fpedrogo]

Re: Limitations with Texture Sizes?

If you use large textures, you will use more memory of ram and due to the SU memory limitation, you could run out of memory. Also I see no reason to use hight resolution image unless you are gong to make a closeup of one object with that particular material or if the object is closer to the camera. I usually don't use textures bigger than 3000dpi for object closer to the camera. For example if I have a brick fence closer to the camera I use a large resolution, but if the fence is further away for the camera, I should use a lower resolution image. If you have more pixel information you will have more render time.
But this is my personal workflow.

Best