Maya texturing, bump etc, most effective way?

[swardson]

the kind of rule of thumb with texture maping sizes is you create the texture map at the maximum size it will be displayed on the final render. Much easier to calculate if you are just doing a still image. so if you are rendering a 1000x1000 image still, the max your textures should be is 1000x1000.

so for this image you are working on, the foreground buildings would be 1000x1000 but the background buildings could be de-resed to 500 px square or less. depending on there size ratio to the final image.

However if you are planning on moving through this scene. Further calculation will be needed.

Another suggestion would be to use procedural textures wherever possible. They use up far less memory and render much faster.

hope this helps.

-Brad

[lv-88]

Actually that did make one hell of a difference hehe :thumbsup:
and now that you've talked about procedurals, the 3d fractal seems to work quite well to make the building look bumpy, and well, the memory usage went down ALOT aswell!

I'm going to use 1500x1500px texture image to work in photoshop with on the frontal building, it's more than half of before and I actually don't see any difference at all, the background building will get smaller ones ;)

thx!

[Kerem]

Excellent scene :thumbsup:

I am learning Maya myself with Maya 4 Fundamentals book. But its not featuring Mental Ray & Final Gather. Can you tell me about the light setup and adjustments ? I never capture that lighting quality.

Thanks

Kerem

[MattBirkett-Smith]

One other thing, make sure you work with textures that are at a power of 2 resolution (i.e. 512, 1024, 2048). I've never actually tested it but I've read that if a texture is say 513x513 it will use as much memory as one that is 1024x1024...

[lv-88]

Hm, that's weird, and I who've just made a 1500x1500px and 500x500px textures hehe, oh well, I'll follow the pattern from now on (256, 512, 1024, 2048 etc.)

As you can see the results look quite ok even with a 1500x1500 texture (the right building, others under major developement), less memory usage, and yes, it's still under construction :thumbsup:
http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/popbeta04.jpg

Thx Kerem :), about the lightsetup, I bassicly use hdr image on a big polygon sphere surrounding the whole scene, then in mental ray I've played a bit with the settings, and there is some glow aswell in the scene, and as of now I use these settings: *they work best when it comes to fast render speed and clean renders, at least for me
http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/popscene_mentalray.jpg

[Hoju]

Make sure to convert file textures to the memory mapped format (.map) when rendering with mental ray. I wrote a script (http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/utility_external/misc/3003.html) that can assist with this.

[neurobasics]

Make sure to convert file textures to the memory mapped format (.map) when rendering with mental ray. I wrote a script (http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/utility_external/misc/3003.html) that can assist with this.
would you mind explaining the pros of converting file textures to the .map format?
thanks!.

[lv-88]

yeah, I'm alos intressted in the benefits, better memory usage? smaller files?

[Hoju]

The .map file format is the mental ray equivalent of the Maya software .bot file. The way mental ray deals with a non memory mapped texture at render time is to read it into memory, decompress it and then write it out to the swap file in a format that mental ray uses internally for rendering. When the texture is needed, it is accessed from the swap file. A memory mapped file can be read directly when rendering and so eliminates the process of loading it into memory. This has the benefit of preventing the render from aborting, due to lack of free memory.


Usually, .map files will render faster than other file formats. It is particularly useful when rendering large resolution textures. On the flip side, textures that are really small (less than 100 kilobytes) will render slower.


The utility that ships with Maya that does the conversion is called imf_copy.exe. It is located in the Program Files\Alias\Maya<version>\bin folder.:)

[neurobasics]

thank you for the detailed explanation. downloaded the script and will try it out.

[anthonymcgrath]

hey Paul, thanks for the explanation on the .map and the script ui interface thing.

So basically if I hook up a biiig texture file node to a lambert (sayyy a big earth texture - 2048pixels..not that big but we'll use it in this example) and put it on my sphere. I basically select the texture file node in the hypershade run the script and the .map is auto-created and the texture file nodes path is linked to the .map file?

Where are these kept on your drive?

also is mental ray happy using a .map on a high res texture but also using a .iff on a model that uses in a smaller texture in the scene or do they all have to be a .map?


I'm also interested in this .bot format - I'm taking it thats for maya software which I never use now but isn't there an adaptive texture res resizing in maya so the further you are away from a texture the smaller it creates it?

interesting thread this one :)

[Hoju]

So basically if I hook up a biiig texture file node to a lambert (sayyy a big earth texture - 2048pixels..not that big but we'll use it in this example) and put it on my sphere. I basically select the texture file node in the hypershade run the script and the .map is auto-created and the texture file nodes path is linked to the .map file?

Yep, that’s how you do it. In fact, the script only recognises file nodes, so you can just marquee select all your textures, run the script and it will convert all the selected files.


Where are these kept on your drive?


The converted files are placed in the same directory as the original image files.

also is mental ray happy using a .map on a high res texture but also using a .iff on a model that uses in a smaller texture in the scene or do they all have to be a .map?

This should work just fine. You can happily have a combination of both. Unless the file is quite small, less than 100 kilobytes uncompressed, it’s a good idea to convert them.

I'm also interested in this .bot format - I'm taking it thats for maya software which I never use now but isn't there an adaptive texture res resizing in maya so the further you are away from a texture the smaller it creates it?

Yes, the .bot file is used by the Maya software renderer. A .bot file divides the image up into a series of tiles. As a particular portion of the texture is required by the renderer, the corresponding tile is loaded into memory. Like the .map format, it’s good at dealing with large resolution textures.


I don’t know about adaptive resolution textures – sorry.

[anthonymcgrath]

so the .map is essentially a format for the mr renderer to break up the image loading in the necessary tile as its needed - thats well cool.


thanks for the info Hoju - gonna give it a shot on my car anim tonight - its currently using about 2 dozen 2048 pixel .iff files erk!

[Hoju]

so the .map is essentially a format for the mr renderer to break up the image loading in the necessary tile as its needed - thats well cool.

No, that’s the .bot file. The way the two files are used by the user is very similar, but the way they work internally is slightly different.:)

[gga]

No, that’s the .bot file. The way the two files are used by the user is very similar, but the way they work internally is slightly different.:)

Actually, it is the same. If you use:

imf_disp -r -p origimage mapimage

you will get ripmap tiles. If you just use imf_disp without -r, you will get a ripmap but without tiling.
Using -r should be more efficient on complex scenes with tons of textures.

[Hoju]

You’re absolutely right, gga. My bad.:banghead:

[anthonymcgrath]

ripmap? I'm guessing you mean .map files


cheers guys - some good stuff to remember there :)

[Hoju]

I think –r is the flag in imf_copy to remap pixels. In other words, it is the option to produce a remapped tileable bitmap image.:)

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