LOD Textures?

[beaker]

mipmap filtering does this automatically but it can buzz& pop with camera movement in/out. Your going to get more speed/quality with Bot/Map files.

[Zaru]

Hey Beaker. I just tried those BOTs and didn't notice any performance gain. Perhaps my textures are just too small (2048 px) for something to be gained from using BOT or I just don't know how to use it properly. What I did is I checked the Use Bot box in File attribute window for each texture file I use in the scene.

I tried the makebot command but it just creates a BOT file and I don't have a clue how to link it to my scene. I searched Maya Docs and Googled the Internet but there's just nothing on it.

[chronic]

bot if for maya software. map is for mental ray

in newer versions of maya, i think 2008 ext 2 and 2009 there is an option in the preferences to automaticaly convert to map style exr at rendertime for mental ray. (it only needs to do it once, and takes care of all the linking automaticaly for you)

you wont neccessarily get speed improvement, only memory savings

in one case i thought i got a speed improvement but it was just because before using .map's mental ray had to continuously flush its cached memory to continue rendering

-As to your original question about LOD - beaker is right, mipmap does that, but your logic for wanting that seems a little strange.

[beaker]

Hey Beaker. I just tried those BOTs and didn't notice any performance gain. Perhaps my textures are just too small (2048 px) for something to be gained from using BOT or I just don't know how to use it properly. What I did is I checked the Use Bot box in File attribute window for each texture file I use in the scene. 2k isn't enought to see much of a speed bump unless you have a lot of textures. More like 8k. Personally I preconvert my textures to BOT/Map and then you just replace the .tif or jpg file you we're using.

tried the makebot command but it just creates a BOT file and I don't have a clue how to link it to my scene. I searched Maya Docs and Googled the Internet but there's just nothing on it.search the manual/cgtalk for "Block oriented texture" and "memory mapped textures".

Most search engines ignore any word 3 letters or under which is why it is sometimes hard to find info about "map" or "bot". Sometimes you can put a * after the 3 letter word and it will come up, so "bot*". Doesn't always work though.

[Zaru]

bot if for maya software. map is for mental ray-As to your original question about LOD - beaker is right, mipmap does that, but your logic for wanting that seems a little strange.
Well, I thought that if there was such thing as on the fly dynamic mipmapping during render process, then when certain object would reach a specific distance from the camera, Maya would replace the super duper hi-res texture with a smaller one thus releasing memory space used by this hypothetical gigantic file. I thought that that would also decrease current frame render time.
From what you said, Block Oriented Texture does similar thing. The texture is divided into blocks and only those of them are loaded into RAM that are currently necessary.
But still, from what I understand, when object with BOT reaches the point at which it's fully within camera resolution gate then all of the texture blocks are loaded, so the memory load is the same as when the texture was without BOT. And it really doesn't matter if the object is so far away that it's barely visible.
Personally I preconvert my textures to BOT/Map and then you just replace the .tif or jpg file you we're using.
Yeah at first I did the same. I replaced the file links to my TIFFs with those BOTs (I'm using software rendering) but Maya just screamed loudly that those files are not images and told me to bug off.

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