TX image format?

[nino anurogo]

Mip-mapping is conditional, render at high-res framebuffer and it's back to full footprint. But I am definitely in support of it. Automated mip-mapping behind the scene, but with control to still allow user-control to modify the amount/level) would be of course fantastic. Most of my machines are 128GB ram and they're not enough... but that's also because 3dsMax and Corona load all assets twice effectively. Not much to do there.
Out-of-Core is just glorified swapping.

But I am like.. not arguing these features don't exist, but they're not features I mentioned. Here is thing A which is maybe similar to feature B. Well, ok.

Hi Juraj, can we trick it so that 3DS Max and Corona don't load assets twice effectively by creating an asset proxy and creating a display as wirebox? does this help reduce RAM usage during the rendering process? Thank you very much

[Juraj]

Not sure to be honest, I don't usually use proxies (hassle to create & manage, although I considered some of the 3rd party plugins that offer more robust solution to this).
But maybe? :- )

[burnin]

Regarding, check PRMan's documentation on their "txmake" tool.
Also, almost all 'heavy lifting' was automated few years ago w/ "RenderMan Utility Manager" (by Amir Ashkezari on GitHub).

[arqrenderz]

I would  really love to push more for memory optimizations for Corona

I made a little experiment with Tx textures
I have some HUGE map textures that we are using to map some mountains on a video, it was made from 9 different textures, each 35K px!
The difference between corona bitmap and TX was in favor of Tx textures by 20gb of Ram... Pretty mind blowing...
This is an edge case i know.. but we all can benefit from lower memory consumption !

[Juraj]

Was it 20GB saving for all 9 maps? I.e 2GB +/- per 35K (8bit RGB?) texture?

I dislike adopting workflow that require me to use arbitrary file format mostly, but maybe this could be good solution for HDRis.

[romullus]

I made a little experiment with Tx textures
I have some HUGE map textures that we are using to map some mountains on a video, it was made from 9 different textures, each 35K px!
The difference between corona bitmap and TX was in favor of Tx textures by 20gb of Ram... Pretty mind blowing...
This is an edge case i know.. but we all can benefit from lower memory consumption !

Did you try this with out of core feature being turned on or off? I think with out of core there shouldn't be much difference between TX and more traditional file formats if at all, because to my knowledge Corona is converting textures to TX internally.

[Avi]

Hi,

The .tx is used in cosmos models because it includes mimapping ( use different resolutions of the texture depending on its size in the final image). This results in significant memory savings and improved rendering speed. While Corona has its own out-of-core rendering for textures, the support for .TX format was provided to ensure compatibility of cosmos models across all chaos products, not just Corona.

In Corona, all textures benefit from Out-of-core rendering as it unloads the memory used by textures to hard drive by using a lower resolution version of them, depending on how far from the camera they appear in the scene.

[Tom]

Thanks, it makes a lot of sense but, honestly, given the power of nowdays cpus and the available amount of RAM in today workstations, I don't really feel the need for it, especially as it creates a new step in the workflow in term of editing the textures, as .TX files aren't directly editable in PS. So it's unlikely I will start using this format, unless the rendering speed gain is significant.

What is the average rendering speed gain?

[Mohammadreza Mohseni]

just in case somebody wants to create tx format image you can do that easily with this tool from OpenImageIO.
this will convert images to tiled, MIP-mapped textures (tx format)

it would be better to add its folder to user variable PATH in windows system environment to make system-wide accessible.


this has many options and it is indeed a great tool.

you may also find this in Arnold and V-Ray plugin folder for 3dsMax