I have a 20,000 pixel wide painted site map that I am using. I think is slowing my render times quite a bit. Does anyone know what file format is best for speed rendering when the image is that size?
Right now it is saved as a jpeg, and registering about 186 megs. I am wondering if a tiled EXR map might render faster? Anyone else have experience with this?
I have never used one as a texture, so I am not sure if that is the direction I should be looking in or not. I am open to all suggestions that are more insightful than simply saying don’t use a 20,000 pixel wide texture map.
Thanks in advance.
Generally speaking, a diffuse texture map doesn’t need to be any bigger than to provide for a 1 to 1 pixel ratio between your map’s resolution and the final render’s resolution. Any more information than that is lost.
If it’s an animation you’re working on and the camera gets close enough to sample enough of the map to need full resolution at times, you might want to swap out for a lower resolution texture for the frames when the camera is farther back. You could use an animated material for that.
Hope this helps,
-Alan
Hehe guess the previous poster didn’t read that part. Anyways, You could check out Wavgen. It’s a plugin that lets you use ECW or JPEG 2000 formats in Max, in practice enabling nearly unlimited image dimensions. There is little slowdown in big images when using it.
What rudeness? Don’t take everything so seriously 
We’re all friends here.
I will check out Wavegen, and see if it will help. But, In this case I wound up just muscling through with the large map. Or I should say I am currently muscling through with the large map.
The map was so large because I was shooting multiple angles around the building. Sometime I was right over the map, so I needed the detail, in other cases, the entire map was contained within the 6,000 pixel image.
A normal person would have used procedurals to get the job done, but I felt I would have a lot more control over the final look if I simply painted it in Photoshop.
I wound up going with an uncompressed tiff, which was just under 1 gb in size.
I would like to use this method of painting more, but I need to do a lot more tests, and look at ways to make it more efficient. Hopefully Wavegen or something similar will help solve my problems.
EDIT: … I have only been at it for 12 years, but after about 6 or 7 you don’t mind the direct talk. Or rudeness as it would sound.
how about if you break your site in tiles, and xref them as you need them per view
layers may work but of course your texture should be brake down in pieces as well…
I haven’t tried yet, but if you use override material with a grey color for GI may reduce your render time…of if you pre-calculated with and small version of it.