Texture compression, Library space saving. PA's please take a look

Quazaque

Dear PA's and other content creators. Please check these close up renders and try to figure out which one has the best quality. Open each one in the next browser tab and switch between them to check and compare.

1 

2

3

And now please try hard to compare and decide which render is the best.... Without cheating.

BE HONEST TO YOURSELF

OK. Now I will tell you what kind of textures and sizes I used  to create them... Each render is a plate using base color and normal map under 'sun light' in IRAY. The difference between them are only base color and normal map textures.

Don't peek further if you didn't decide yet!!!!

1- JPG format quality 8 converted from PNG original

2- PNG original

3-JPG format quality 10 converted from PNG original

And now I will just calculate the approximate size the library of 1000 products (each product = approximately 20 of textures used in examples) will take on our hard drive filled with textures according to compression of textures used in above examples.

1- (2,16 Mb for two JPG8  textures) x 20 x 1000 = 43200Mb = 43,2Gb

2- (14,52 Mb for two PNG textures) x 20 x 1000 = 2904000Mb = 290,4Gb

3- (4,15 Mb for two JPG10 textures) x 20 x 1000 = 83000Mb = 83Gb

I posted original (PNG textures used) in the middle to make it easy to compare both of jpg compressions to original.

JPG 8 or 10 = is a quality I put in textures during compression from original PNG source to JPG using Photoshop.

But library size is not the most mportant thing that bothers me. As you should know, IRay uses VRAM to render a picture.

If you put the same quantity of puppets in the scene covered in JPGs instead of PNGs you can probably still use your GPU to render in IRay and take twice less time than it would definitely take using CPU because your scene is too huge and exceeds your VRAM ...

...JUST BECAUSE ALL YOUR PUPPETS ARE USING PNGs OR EVEN (OH GOD) TIFs IN THEIR MATERIALS INSTEAD OF JPGs.

I hope it was informative enough.

Don't forget that you will make UHQ extreme closeups only 3% of your renders (or only 3% of users make them for their strange reason). And almost all of renders will be further away from camera than in the examples I've shown.

BUT!!! even if you use ultra heavy TIF 500Mb crap texture you will get artifacts when you render object too close to camera.

No kidding, yesterday I've found 490Mb TIF normal mar that was blurry as hell. It was converted to 10Mb just because it HAS TO BE TIF if it was saved  in TIF by PA.

Good luck.

Quazaque

As you can see, the JPG with quality of 8 after converting from PNG provides the same quality of render but takes almost 6 times less space in our library and ensures to use more puppets in scene without exceeding the VRAM our GPU provides.

Richard Haseltine

Most images are supplied in jpg format anyway. However, as far as I know Iray does not pass the images to the renderer in their original format (3Delight certainly doesn't), and it applies its own compression to large images (see Advanced tab of Render Settings).

16-bit per channel tiff is often used for things like displacement where an 8-bit per channel format would produce staircasing, though that is more relevant to 3Delightt han Iray.

Subject to the above note on bit depth, there is nothing stopping you from changing to another format and assigning through the Surfaces pane (or by search-and-replace in the settings file) - or you can use a tool like https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

Quazaque

Richard it just takes space and time... and one more product to convert those ridiculously enormous textures that take it for no particular reason.

Quazaque

"Most images" - yeah that's what I talk about. Some of them are TIF or PNG without reason.

But some products are completely with PNGs and this article is supposed to reach those PA's who are still doing it.

This particular example is from a product that consists exclusively of PNGs.

And even those with JPGs are ususally too big. There are a lot of 10Mb JPGs that could take only 1-2Mb.

For DAZ stuff it HAS to be important because I'm sure there are customers that keep themselves from buying more products because they don't have space for ridiculously exaggerated library.

Richard Haseltine

Downsizing an image that is too large for you is at least possible, the reverse isn't.

Quazaque

But there is no need in reverse. The quality of render will be the same. I shown you three different renders to make it clear :

There is no need to keep them that big. 

 As I said, this example is from a 400Mb product that could take 70Mb if they just convert their PNGs to JPGs. I can not just convert them to JPGs because when you load a prop there will be missing files and you will have to manually change texture paths to those JPGs.

Of course there is a limit. But looks like not all PA's are aware of happy medium. Why don't they save  each texture 500Mb then so we can downsize it 500 times for each distancing from camera?

I just wanna reach those creators.

I've seen textures that were made just by multyplying 10 times (copying and pasting on two axes)  a tileable texture sample without adding any features and saving it as 8000x8000 PNG. It looks like crap and takes 50Mb instead of 500Kb. And selling it as HD clothing just because they think 8000x8000 texture is an HD.

I try not to rage and keep it educational, sorry if I didn't manage. 

FSMCDesigns

There is this to help you https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

and this free script https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137161/reduce-texture-sizes-easily-with-this-script/p1

Enjoy!

Quazaque

Thank you Michael.

But the purpose of my post was to make texture makers think one more time about textures they include in their products. If all artists will compress their textures properly, our (and their) library would take a half of what it takes now.

Doing it manually is a pain....