Hello All,
Couldn’t find a topic about this so thought I would start one. Just wondering if coronabitmap supports tiled exr or tx formats?
I’m been testing a few scenes where I convert the large bitmaps (over 4k) to tiled exr or tx. Max loads a hell of a lot quicker and it can save a lot of RAM when rendering as well.
Pixamoon’s bitmap relinking script can convert automatically, although it currently doesnt support coronabitmap.
any thoughts or experience in doing this?
Peter
Had a quick read on tiled exr’s - very interesting, I did not know this was a thing. If I understand correctly, Max will only load parts of the exr texture visible in the render to RAM? Any downsides to this workflow?
I wonder if this could be implemented within corona using regular jpg’s?
yes definitely has a lot of potential as everyone moves towards bigger and bigger textures.
Is it similar to UDIM?
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/ Native UDIM support...
No, what peterguthrie is referring to is basically mipmapping in a texture format. Multiple resolutions of the texture are stored in a container (exr or tif), and the renderer then uses smarts to choose the correct resolution inside the tiled image based on distance to camera, and thus is able to efficiently use RAM resources. The user is also able to bias the resolution chosen by the renderer by changing the blur value if they want to.
In a perfect world, I’d love for Corona to be able to load in tiled UDIM’s for the most efficiency in memory usage and shader setup.
Could this not be done on the fly with regular jpg’s? For example: rays are cast from the camera to scene objects to determine the optimal resolution of the texture, the render engine then downsamples a copy of the jpg into RAM, dumping the original large texture. Sure this might take some additional processing time - but could be invaluable on heavy/static scenes.
The whole point for tiled textures is that the renderer doesn’t have to load in the largest size to ‘down sample’ anything. It’s way more efficient for time and memory to simply select a lower res tile (or ‘mipmap’) from a container than to load in the largest resolution, decompress it, then generate a lower res version of that map all on the fly.
I remember Ondra once said that something similar is planned for Corona bitmap.
exciting news!
A big thumbs up for this!
With a lot of 100-300Mb textures, life is getting really hard.
Would be great to directly support .tx files.
Have there been any developments on this?
We’re looking at converting our library to use .tx files but we want to maintain compatibility across VRay and Corona.
i waited for this feature for years… that would huge time save… thumbs up for this one!
I have just reported this directly to the dev/qa team and will be sure to notify you once any specific plans regarding this feature are know.
If you have some examples showing this feature in action, or if you have any experience using it, please share.
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We are investigating, but if anyone could provide a very simple scene featuring a tiled EXR and/or TX texture that works in some other renderer (e.g. V-Ray), but not in Corona, that would be greatly appreciated.
Update: ok so it seems .tx format cannot be loaded into a Corona Bitmap at all. It can be loaded into VrayHDRI loader and then plugged into a Corona Mtl, but I have no idea if this works fine and whether it brings any benefit.
Question: is “TX” and “Tiled EXR” the same thing? Or are these two separate formats?
I believe .tx is basically a “container”… Usually, creation process is automated. But can also be made manually.
Thanks a lot!
BUMP!
still very interested in tx files. Can coronabitmap load them now? (as vrayhdri does)
or has this happened and I missed it?
I’d also like to bump this!
One of our teams in another office were using this on a large VRay project and saw some crazy reductions in RAM usage.
is there any news on this issue, it is quite a long time old and it would be a breakthrough.