Textures formats : TIF/LZW - PNG

hansolocambo

A lot (way too many) characters bundles come with TIF uncompressed textures. It's a bit frustrating to see one's hard drive filled with textures folders of 500MB for 1 character, when the same folder could be about 50MB or less if the TIF format was saved properly, or if the PNG format was strongly advised for content creators.

The reason for that being, I guess, that a lot of people confuse pixel compression (JPEG, GIF) and data compression (PNG, TIF/LZW, 7zip, ZIP, RAR, etc.)

PNG compressed and TIFF compressed (LZW) can take up to 10 times less space on the hard drive (depending on the file) and loading time in the scene is basically the exact same on a proper computer.

Please consider making mandatory for DAZ content creators the use of PNG compressed and TIF (LZW compression) to save some of our hard drives space. Photoshop does that easily.

If changing the image format to a more compressed (lossless) format saves space to all your customers without lowering at all the quality of the end product, I'd say it's definitely worth considering.

Richard Haseltine

This is something you waould need to send to Daz, via a ticket - posting in Product Suggestions won't necessarily be seen at all, though it may generate some discussion or suggestions of improved workflows with the tools we have.

Seven193

hansolocambo said:

Please consider making mandatory for DAZ content creators the use of PNG compressed and TIF (LZW compression) to save some of our hard drives space. Photoshop does that easily.

 

If you're saying compression is best and always results in a smaller file size, then I would have to disagree with you. You're still compressing the full image, no data has been removed.  Lossy removes image data, so your image will be smaller.  JPG rules here, that's why websites still use JPG instead of PNG or TIF.

But, I've noticed that if a Daz product uses PNG textures, the creator is probably using software like Substance Painter, that tends to export everything as PNG.  So, the fact they're not converting them to JPG just tells me they're being lazy about it.

And if a creator is using TIF, it's usually because they're using it to save 16-bit channel normal maps (bump,displacement,etc..), instead of the usual 8-bit channel map. Not because it has compression.

Ascania

Seven193 said:

If you're saying compression is best and always results in a smaller file size, then I would have to disagree with you. You're still compressing the full image, no data has been removed.  Lossy removes image data, so your image will be smaller.  JPG rules here, that's why websites still use JPG instead of PNG or TIF.

 And for textures you DON'T want lossy compression, you don't want to remove image data, you don't want to add compression artifacts and uncontrolled noise. Instead you want the full image, but compressed losslessly so it wastes less space on your HDD.