Got a question for all you texture magicians out there.
I just created an ambiance map for a background by jacking up the contrast and simply saved it as a colour map, rather than doing the extra step and converting it to grayscale.
In your experience, does it matter? Does a grayscale image eat up less resources at render time than a 24 bit colour image?
Depends on the renderer, and the number and size of maps. If you have a lot of 4k-8k maps that could be grayscale but are color instead, that’s a lot more data to read from disk and a lot of data to put into memory (some renderers are better than others at memory management of textures). Personally I’d probably convert to greyscale unless it’s only a few smaller maps.
Okay… interesting that I wasn’t suspecting I’d get an answer like that. I’m using the 3DLight render engine, and I’m not sure how well it manages data… it’s not an ultra slow engine like, say LUX, but neither is it very fast…
I’ll take your advice and go that extra step. Seems the safest bet.
3Delight manages texture data really well - I’ve got an asset which is using 800 uv patches which each have a 4K colour map and a 2K displacement map on them at the moment.
Aside from the disk-space savings of using greyscale textures, it’s possible that it’s quicker to read the texture data from the disk and it may use less memory at rendertime if the data is being stored in a float variable rather than a colour variable.
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