Which renders faster, procedural map textures or image map textures?

[SpiralFace]

Depends on how complex of a procedural, compared to how high resolution the image maps are.

But for the most part, its faster to render procedural, as its not having to open up external files to produce its calculations. The more you can handle within the material editiors, the faster the renders tend to be.

[imdiye]

i see.. thanks

[soulburn3d]

But for the most part, its faster to render procedural, as its not having to open up external files to produce its calculations. The more you can handle within the material editiors, the faster the renders tend to be.

As you said, it kinda depends, but personally I've found that it's way faster to render maps than to render with procedurals in a production environment. But maybe it's just the complexity of the procedurals, you generaly don't place just a single Noise map or something on a surface. In a simple case like that, the procedural may be faster.

- Neil

[Trauco]

And what about maps + procedurals?

For example ye olde trick of using a photograph of grass, tiled at 1,1,1 and the same photograph tiled at 1.1,1.1,1.1, and then blend them using a noise map.

(I'm under the impression that it is really fast, but i could be wrong)

What are your impressions?

[CHRiTTeR]

you could test this yourself quite easy no?

[Trauco]

you could test this yourself quite easy no?

Obviously I had, but since i can't possibly test every single possible scenario, and not everyone of us works at a big facility tackling hard projects it is quite a good idea to ask around, maybe someone has a different opinion.

Or MAYBE not everyone has done a lot of renders, and you could probably save a couple of hundred hours from someone trying to learn, just by sharing your point of view.

Is it faster while using mental ray map manager and exr files?

Is it faster without using mental ray map manager and png files?

Is it faster or slower while using satellites?

Is it more or less likely to cause a bug while using a render farm?

and as I said before:

(I'm under the impression that it is really fast, but i could be wrong)

What are your impressions?

[soulburn3d]

And what about maps + procedurals?

For example ye olde trick of using a photograph of grass, tiled at 1,1,1 and the same photograph tiled at 1.1,1.1,1.1, and then blend them using a noise map.

(I'm under the impression that it is really fast, but i could be wrong)

What are your impressions?

Well, it's all cumulative. Rendering 2 maps of grass will probably be slower than 1 map of grass. Adding a procedural to mix between will be slower than rendering just the two layers of grass with no mask. Replacing that procedural with a map to mix may be faster, but only slightly, since it's not too expensive calculating a single noise.

But some noises are expensive. Like if you have a cellular noise and set fractal iterations to 8.

Also, many noises, like darktree, don't antialias themselves, so to avoid sparkling results, you need to supersample the procedural, which can slow renders way down, whereas filtering a bitmap is faster at the render stage than supersampling a procedural, since it basically just involves looking up a few values in the bitmap rather than calculating multiple values in a more complex formula.

Hope that makes sense.

- Neil

[Trauco]

Hope that makes sense.

Actually, it does! thanks a lot! Specially this part:

Also, many noises, like darktree, don't antialias themselves

That explains some incoherent results that i had

[soulburn3d]

Also, many noises, like darktree, don't antialias themselves

That explains some incoherent results that i had

That said, I am a big fan of using darktree, since you can get some fantastic effects that are difficult to achieve any other way, but you just have to keep in mind that you'll need to supersample your texture, or if you're using a renderer like Brazil/mentalray, you may need to increase your samples to avoid crawling.

- Neil

[musashidan]

What a shame they havn't recompiled(Darktree/SimbiontMax) for 2010. :sad:

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.