Why 50 mb tif normal maps instead of jpgs

macro2k7_50e18e3b02

eventually you get to the point where space is an issue with a content directory. Every daz figure now seems to have a series of 50 mb tif's for normal maps. Is there any reason for this being better than a lossless jpg that is a fifth or a tenth the size?

Richard Haseltine

No jpg is lossless - it's just a question of how much is lost. Normals are more sensitive to the effects of compression - that's why they are excluded from the Iray strong compression routines in DS too.

pwiecek

Jpgs are 8 bit while tif's can be 32 bit (Poser only supports 16 bit tif's  & I don't know what DS supports). When experimenting with displacement maps, I found that jpgs gave a stair step look to the final render. This was greatly reduced or eliminated when using tifs.

This thread talks about displacements but the idea is the same

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3269/

mjc1016

There is one other thing...they aren't taking up any 'extra' space when sent to the video card for rendering.  They are already as big as they'll get, while the jpgs could (and when actually being used for rendering, probably are) be decompressed at some point, so they'll 'inflate' to that roughly 50 MB size, anyway.