Opacity tex comparison

[romullus]

Ok, here's my latest findings.

What's influencing render time:

bit depth - has no impact
image compression - has no impact
additional layers and layer compression - has no impact
channels - does big impact:
  RGB - normal render time
  RGBA - time penalty
  grayscale, indexed colours - huge bonus

All tests was done in Corona, with tiff file format in opacity map. I may do further tests with MR and/or scanline later.

[Ludvik Koutny]

I am actually curious if this is just behavior of TIF, or other file formats as well :) Max does not use one universal plugin to handle image formats. Instead, it has different plugins for different formats of varying quality.

So i would first make sure if this is general behavior, or only TIF format related behavior :)

[romullus]

Yes, it's translates to other formats that support alpha channel and/or single channel options.

[Ondra]

ok, I dont have time to investigate this right now, maybe in 2 weeks ;)

[Ludvik Koutny]

I see...

Anyway...  thanks a lot for these tests. I know very well that objective testing takes a lot of patience and time. So not many people take their time to systematically test something, but almost everytime someone does, they discover something either very useful, or some severe bug, which when removed, speeds up or improves quality of Corona a lot :)

[romullus]

That's interesting, i found that it's related to filtering. If i set texmap filtering to "all" - difference in render time between RGB, RGBA and monochrome, completely disappears.

One additional finding is that standart material's opacity map isn't affected by texmap filtering in Corona settings. I'll report that as a bug.

[snakebox]

Sorry for reviving this topic, but I haven't seen any changelogs for some of things being fixed?  And I am curious of all this is the same scenario when using .tga files compared to gif/png ?

Thanks guys! interesting find for sure.