Texturing Problem (8)

[charliehong]

Hi all you 3d gurus.

I have a scene im texturing and the textures come out right, but the scene become EXTREEMLY hevy to render. It seems to me the xsi loads the same texture many times into the memory. Allthough the objects all have the same material and texture, xsi loads the texture once for each object. can anyone help me

[atyss]

Bonjour hjaltip,

You say that all your objects have the same material and the same texture... Do you mean that they all have their own material and texture but the same one, or do you mean that they actually share one material and texture?

To make several objects share one material and texture, group them, and apply those material and texture to the group.

Also, are your textures big (like 2k and more?) If so, you can create memory-mapped textures. They will render much faster, altough the first frame will take longer. To create those memory-mapped textures, do the following:

-Open the XSI command prompt
-Browse to the folder where your big textures are
-Type the following command:

imf_copy -p filename.pic filename.map map

Do this for every big texture file. This will create a .map file, with the same name as your texture file, twice the size of the .pic file. Now when you render the renderer will take the .map file instead of the .pic file. You should see improvements in your render times.

The only problem is that if you make changes to the texture, you have to recreate the .map file.

Hope this helps
Bernard Lebel

[richard-sher]

Also, when you assign a texture for the second time, do you...

1. Choose it from the "Texture Image" drop down?
2. Choose New>New From File?
3. Choose New>New New From Source?

I believe that choosing option 2 or 3 will add another texture to your scene even if it's the same texture. (This is so you can change these "new" textures from within XSI so that they are different from each other.)

Using option 1 will share the texture map between all of the objects that have it applied to it.

Another thing that you can do to help eliminate textures that are no longer needed in the scene is to use "Clear Unused Images Sources." You can find it under Netview>Tools>Render