BIG textures: Slow loads, moire effects?

[laurent]

I'm not sure if you're talking about moire after an acctual render or in the editor window?

[Per-Anders]

Texture loading is dependent on your memory, hard drive speed, the file format and the sampling method used. Larger textures will also take longer to load in.

The first two are simple, get as much ram and as fast a hard drive as possible.

The file format is also simple, don't ever use MOV or AVI files for textures, always used image sequences, don't bother using a compressed file format if you can help it because it just adds signifigantly to the load time and it doesn't save any memory within the scene itself (the file is merely decompressed into ram which takes additional time), so skip jpegs etc as they're just a neat way to add artifacting and slow everything down, keep with targa's, tiffs, b3d, and png's.

With the sampling method, MIP mapping is always going to be slower than most other methods (the slowest being SAT mapping), it will also be more memory intensive (though not as much as SAT), any other sampling method will be much faster but also will be more prone to aliasing artifacts (the moire you get in motion), the only solutions to this are to either increase your AA settings to use higher values thus slowing down the render or keep on using MIP or SAT mapping (which will resolve the texture aliasing issues so you do not need such high aliasing levels).

[the-negative]

Rendertime. The texture's particularly filled with detailed lines.

p/s: I'm already loading PNGs and using MIPs. Will try SAT sampling.

[laurent]

"Rendertime. The texture's particularly filled with detailed lines.
p/s: I'm already loading PNGs and using MIPs. Will try SAT sampling"
? ? ? ?
I still don't know what is the problem, think you could put a little more effort in responding to your own thread, loading and rendering are different things, otherwise no, I never noticed cinema taking abnormal amount of time loading texture for the material editor and displaying them on the screen, it always seem faster than illustrator for example.

[the-negative]

These are really big textures we're talking about, not the normal 2K ones. One color PNG is 50MB (The Arroway ones)
I have ~1GB of RAM but it still takes 2 mins to load one color map, bump/specular/reflection/diffusion/normal maps.

Edit: SAT sampling works perfectly- no moire patterns. Yet C4D is taking huge ammounts of time (15 mins) to actually sample my maps before actual rendering commences-MIP runs much faster. Still, thanks for the pointers, Per-anders!

[Srek]

Maybe try to use TGA files instead of PNG.
Cheers
Björn

[STRAT]

what are the any advantages/dissadvantages of TGA's over TIFF's or viccyverca?

[Srek]

what are the any advantages/dissadvantages of TGA's over TIFF's or viccyverca?
Not that much, i observed some speed advantages when using TGA compared to TIFFs.
Using uncompressed formats will slow down loading a small bit, but will spare CINEMA the need to uncompress the information internaly on each load.
I can only recommend to check both options if you encounter speed problems with large textures.
Cheers
Björn

[LemonNado]

The high res arroway's are for print. If you use them for work with screen resolution then you are wasting your systems resources.

Simply take a look a the size of those monsters. Don;t look at the compressed size, take a look at the uncompressed size in memory, then add the fact that MS has the worst memory management in the industry and you know why you might even crash as there is barely a contiguous patch of memory in that size available.

And to scale, map, shade every pixel in your 7K map does take time. I tend to chop a piece of my Arroway's and then let the render engine tile it. No loss in resolution on the display and a happy render engine.

If you need large large print res, then go with XSI as there are Mental Ray plugins which allow you to manage textures of unlimited size (yes, unlimited... TB is need be). That render would be in tiles and you would have to stitch it together after rendering but I have rendered massive images that way. C4D is at it's end where that alternative starts.
Rainer

[Per-Anders]

I would have to disagree about choosing XSI for large print res, it's not just about rendering large textures, but actually rendering a large image, the MR bridge in XSI has serious issues when attempting to render anything larger than a few k without heavy tiling, XSI would to be honest be my last choice for printwork.

[the-negative]

Lemonnardo, I'm doing print res, not pretty high (~4K max) but considering my layouts are unfortunately close to the textures at a low angle, I still need hires textures. (Getting XSI/learning MR seems too far-fetched- from what I've heard, there's a plugin in MAX that does this too. I'm now hoping someone implements this in C4D, and one-up it with LOD degradation)

After loading the PNGs on my buggy secondary HDD they load like a breeze and since I'm using SAT for Color/Bump speeds are fast too. :)

[LemonNado]

Good Lord... I must tell my 500$ XSI license that it cannot do what it did again last night. Thanks for the hint! ;-) Btw... I show C4D one of the 37 Geometries I load into XSI in one scene and it's giving up on me. But yes, tile work. But all really large renders are tile work. There is a great camera rig which automates that completely. We render to the limits of Photoshop usability. SoftImage Gigapolygon core.... Hmmmmmmmmm! And again... 500$ Software... lolz...
Rainer

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