Image file format and RAM consumption

[Ondra]

grayscale loading: I think it is simply the "road less travelled" - less people actually use those code branches, so errors are not discovered and fixed. When we switched to OpenImageIO, we found several bugs in various image implementations, but none were in 8bit jpegs - it was 16bit tgas alpha channel, monochromatic tiff gamma, etc.

[Njen]

Just tested 32bit files again. 3dsMax has issue with reading grey-scale 32bit Tiffs, and in order to save them into .exr or .hdr, they need to be RGB. What is the solution to this ?

It is possible to save single channel exr's in Nuke.

Instead of painfully re-saving something to grey-scale manually, is there something like in Unreal where I can read individual channels from bitmaps ?
If not, maybe Corona Bitmap could add such option.

As romullus mentioned, RGBTint is a computationally lightweight method to split out R, G and B channels from an image. If you need the red channel, you make the red swatch white, and the green and blue swatches black.

[nino anurogo]

..

Thanks Ryuu, your answers helped me great deal! I'm working on a simple scene, but Corona was throwing low memory warnings even at lowest resolution renderings. I did few optimizations to some unnecessary heavy assets and now i can render at 4K without problems. That is quite an achievement for my 16 GB RAM! :]

Hi Romullus, can you please describe steps to do the few optimizations you mention here ? Thank you

[romullus]

Obviously i can't remember what exactly i did 5 years ago, but i think i went through my textures and made sure that all the textures that don't need extended bit depth, would be saved in 8 bits per channel and all the greyscale textures would be saved as single channel images. If that still doesn't solve low RAM issue, then the other most effective way to lower RAM consumption is to reduce texture resolution, just be aware that this potentially can come at the cost of lower final image quality. On the other hand, with modern Corona you may not need any of this, because it evolved since and introduced some memory saving features, like out of core textures.

[nino anurogo]

Obviously i can't remember what exactly i did 5 years ago, but i think i went through my textures and made sure that all the textures that don't need extended bit depth, would be saved in 8 bits per channel and all the greyscale textures would be saved as single channel images. If that still doesn't solve low RAM issue, then the other most effective way to lower RAM consumption is to reduce texture resolution, just be aware that this potentially can come at the cost of lower final image quality. On the other hand, with modern Corona you may not need any of this, because it evolved since and introduced some memory saving features, like out of core textures.

Thank you for your reply, actually I'm still just studying Corona Renderer through various forums and haven't purchased it yet

[romullus]

You can always download Corona and activate 30 days trial. That should make studying process much easier as well as help to make decision about purchasing :]