Texture Size Maximum

[dwgregg3d]

I have a 16k x 16k texture that Maya is completely choking on. As it is an entire planetary plain, so I need the foreground detail as high as possible. Maya dies before any attempt to render, just on load. Maya chokes on it on both an x64 system system with 6 gig of ram and an XP32 with 4 gig. I can always break it up in to foreground and background sections and manually tile it, but that's rather a pain.

My friend running Houdini has no problem handling it and rendering it.

Just wondering if there are any memory, or mapping tricks that can make this image work as is.

Cheers,

[gmask]

Maya has a limit of 8k x 8k max rez on images..

what you can do is divide your image into 4 8k sections and then adjust the 2d texture placement nodes so that the first quarter fills a quarter of the texture space and then connect the next image to the default color of the node and so until all quarters are filled. You'll need to turn off texture wrapping as well so that you don't see a seam. I've done this for textures that total 40k x 80k it was alot of segments but maya handled it perfectly.

It would also be advisable to turn them into bot files for the standard renderer or map files for mental ray

[dwgregg3d]

Having to divide textures into 4 or 8k sections feels like I've been caught in a time warp and thrown back to the 1980's. But wait, Wavefront didn't have a problem with it back in the 1980's!

Just seems like dividing up textures to optimum size is something that the software should be smart enough to do.

cheers,

[joojaa]

QUOTE(dwgregg3d @ 06/30/08, 09:07 PM) [snapback]287677[/snapback]
Just seems like dividing up textures to optimum size is something that the software should be smart enough to do.

It is, your your opengl viewport does not do larger than that. The software renderers dont have any problems with bigger texures. The viewport is a preview after all so no idea in choking it up unnesseserily. (remeber textures use up memory in squares, so a 8K texture uses up 4 times the memory of a 4k texture. And as a result it uses without alpha EXACTLY 201,326,592 bytes of video memory, no ifile size does not count for lookup it must be loaded. This essentially means theres room for exactly 1-2 8k textures on a quadro fx 3700 for example, ofcourse the gfx card is a bit smarter then that and it never loads your full size texture entirely since it KNOWS you don't use it all)

It is however a totaly different thing do you actually need the full resolution for anything. I mean its not like you will be using every single resulting textel anyway.

So you should turn it to map or bot (for gfx card dds) so the texel lookup can be saner. And thus the rendrer can load tiles on demand. Normal formats arent ordered for this kind of look up so they must be in memory

PS: so to recap the limitation is there for a reason, id suspect thya will pump it to 16k in a while but still.

[user_deleted]

Wanna jump in here, having similar issues.

QUOTE
and then connect the next image to the default color of the node

Gmask can you explain in a bit more detail here? I don't get how you connect several file nodes to one shader's color input?

[gmask]

QUOTE(holographix @ 06/30/08, 12:31 PM) [snapback]287685[/snapback]
Wanna jump in here, having similar issues.
Gmask can you explain in a bit more detail here? I don't get how you connect several file nodes to one shader's color input?

okay first if you set the coverage of a 2d texture node to .5 x .5 then the image will only fill the lower left and quarter of the texture space. The rest of the texture space will by default be filled with gray which is set with the default color on the file texture node. So if you connect another file texture node to the default color input you can edit it's 2d texture placement node so that it's coverage is .5 x .5 and then set the Translate Frame to .5 so that it fills another quadrant of the 2d texture space.

[gmask]

QUOTE(dwgregg3d @ 06/30/08, 10:07 AM) [snapback]287677[/snapback]
Having to divide textures into 4 or 8k sections feels like I've been caught in a time warp and thrown back to the 1980's. But wait, Wavefront didn't have a problem with it back in the 1980's!

I've mainly have been using this technique for images that are 40k by 80k.. I can't imagine what kind of 80's hardware could have handled that but it wouldn't fit on your desktop

[dwgregg3d]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 06/30/08, 02:13 PM) [snapback]287679[/snapback]
It is, your your opengl viewport does not do larger than that. The software renderers dont have any problems with bigger texures. The viewport is a preview after all so no idea in choking it up unnesseserily. (remeber textures use up memory in squares, so a 8K texture uses up 4 times the memory of a 4k texture. And as a result it uses without alpha EXACTLY 201,326,592 bytes of video memory, no ifile size does not count for lookup it must be loaded. This essentially means theres room for exactly 1-2 8k textures on a quadro fx 3700 for example, ofcourse the gfx card is a bit smarter then that and it never loads your full size texture entirely since it KNOWS you don't use it all)

It is however a totaly different thing do you actually need the full resolution for anything. I mean its not like you will be using every single resulting textel anyway.
So you should turn it to map or bot (for gfx card dds) so the texel lookup can be saner. And thus the rendrer can load tiles on demand. Normal formats arent ordered for this kind of look up so they must be in memory
PS: so to recap the limitation is there for a reason, id suspect thya will pump it to 16k in a while but still.

Two things on this.

1. I'm talking about software render in this case and not graphic display. MR produces an error "image too big" when it gets beyond 8k or so and I have a Mercader map that 21,000 pixels wide and some elevation maps that are 16k sq. I can divide them up, but why in this day and age does Maya software not handle maps that Wavefront or Symbolics or Houdini or Max could do with no complaint. Is there a preference setting some place saying "I want to go back to my Cubicomp on a PC XT?"

2. As a point of reference, Maya used to be smart enough to scale any image size to fit the graphics limitations without requiring me to do what the computer should do automatically. Only of late has it been "optimized" to be less useful.

[dwgregg3d]

QUOTE(gmask @ 06/30/08, 09:20 PM) [snapback]287693[/snapback]
I've mainly have been using this technique for images that are 40k by 80k.. I can't imagine what kind of 80's hardware could have handled that but it wouldn't fit on your desktop

Lol. Think refrigerator sized, 64 muffin fans, 220 volts of power sporting a state of the art 20 mhz processor. ;O)

[dwgregg3d]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 06/30/08, 02:13 PM) [snapback]287679[/snapback]
The software renderers dont have any problems with bigger texures.

That's just it, the software renderer is choking and putting up an error message complaining about the image file being too big. Is there as setting somewhere that will change what the software will take.

The machine is an 8 core with x64 and 8 gig of ram. I'm more than a little appalled that it chokes and I'd like nothing more than to find out that it was my error and not an embarrassing design flaw in the software (embarrassing because Houdini and Max will do it but the mighty Maya won't).

Perhaps there is an mel script that does what gmask suggests...

Perhaps, if I get the time I'll fire up XSI and see what it does there (or ask on the XSI forum at least).

This is a project where I really need some big maps and they are changing all of the time as new material comes in so I'm loath to waste a lot of time doing a manual task that Maya should do for itself.

[dwgregg3d]

Well it seems that some of "my" problems with texture render size is due to 8.5's limitations. I just tried the same 21000 pixel wide map on 2008 and it works just fine. Graphics doesn't do the smart thing and automatically fit the texture to the graphics card and/or settings, but that's not such a pain to do manually (unless I've got a pile of textures).

(I really hate to upgrade so close to Siggraph knowing the next release is one month away!).

[joojaa]

did you try to convert the image to map format, for mr and or bot for maya software. As they are allready tiled.

Anyway ive tried and rendered the full size blue marble map on maya and mr (man was it hustle), it was however a abit waste of resources, as when i tiled it up to only releant tiles i got render speedup of 700% not to mention the time and energy it took to convert it to map.

Hell even prman didnt like the full size map, and when i analyzed i never even used the lowest resolution texels for anything.

See the problem is that just putting a high enough res texture does not guarantee best quality. In fact once you gos past the optimim size into higher size your going to get all sorts of prob0lems. It sounds counter intuitive but its actually pretty normal signal processing stuff.

[dwgregg3d]

I'll try the MR map convert, but it will a bit of an added pain because the map is a work in progress and changing all the time. It seems that a conversion should be a radio button somewhere that causes it to happen automatically if a change is detected in the original source.

Oh well...

Thanks all!

[ptb]

QUOTE(dwgregg3d @ 07/08/08, 03:03 PM) [snapback]288073[/snapback]
I'll try the MR map convert, but it will a bit of an added pain because the map is a work in progress and changing all the time.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/me...ripts-2372.html