Fatal Error: Tiff Format

[Atestheus]

I would highly recommend converting your tiffs to Maya native iff format. I believe Maya converts all file formats into this format at time of render anyway, so you would pick up a wee bit on rendering as well as image size (I've plugged 10 000 x 10 000 iffs through no problem, but only up to 6000 x 6000 with other formats). You can download the photoshop iff plugin at Alias's site. One word of caution, though, I'd recommend merging your images down to a single layer, exporting as iff out of photoshop, then undo merge. The plugin seems to have problems with layers sometimes. If for some reason that plugin does not work (often) you can start fcheck through the command prompt and open the tiff with the "retain image size" or something flag (I'm running Maya 6 and the new fcheck is better so I can't check the exact flag). Check fcheck's help menu for which one.

Hope that helps

Shawn

[playmesumch00ns]

Maya's TIFF support is really shoddy. It tries to convert any files to iff's as soon as you try and display them, for instance if you use hardware texturing in the viewport. Just keep the psd around and faltten your image for importing into maya. You don't want to bring layers into a 3d program anyway.

[djx]

I have always used single layer tiff's without any problems. Sometimes as large as 4096x4096 (although the uv-texture window maxes out at 2048x2048).

(Mentalray doesnt like tiffs though - I have used tga's for that.)

Now that the PSD format is supported, via the psd-texture node, I have been using layered psd file textures. They work really well. Maya recognises "layer sets" and you can select which layer-set should be used. This means you can have you bump, color, specular, diffuse etc all in the same psd - each in its own layer set. You can even keep a uv-snapshot in the file. This helps me keep things much more organized.

(Im not sure if the psd node is supported in mentalray.)

[beaker]

Maya's TIFF support is really shoddy. It tries to convert any files to iff's as soon as you try and display them, for instance if you use hardware texturing in the viewport. Just keep the psd around and faltten your image for importing into maya.It's not really because of Maya but more because of all the apps out there that write unstandard tiffs. Many apps have added different compression schemes for tiff that Maya doesn't support(like zip compression). Also maya internally converts everything to BOT textures, not iff.

[mrgoodbyte]

Also maya internally converts everything to BOT textures, not iff.

Maybe going off-topic here... But this is not entirely true. The Maya renderer converts everything to BOT, Maya (the application) does not. It is in fact able to decode BOT files and display them in the GUI but does use it's natve IFF format for shader networks and such.
Maybe you've noticed the entry "File Textures" in RAM statistics when rendering with Maya. This is the memory used in the conversion from the original format (IFF, TIF, etc.) to BOT.

Back to the topic.
Maya is quite picky on TIFF files. If I use tiff I always do single layer, LZW compression, native byte order, 8-bit/16-bit. The more data your pumping into Maya the slower it's going to run. So try to minimise that.

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