tiff or targa

[brendanjbond007]

hi there all,

i'm just curious, if you are making a movie 3d animation and i'm gonna use a file texture, which is more useful, targa file texture or tiff file taexture?

thanx

[murdok]

Either one works the same as far as quality and file size I believe. One for sure has an alpha channel, maybe both...that may be the difference. Check on that.

I personally use really large .jpg files. But that's my preference. If I was doing a large animation, with lots going on, I would dumb down my textures....

http://www.mayang.com/textures/

To get an idea of the textures I use go to this link. Of course most of these textures need to be re-leveled and offset for tiling...A lot of these textures are 1600*1200--which is gargantian....huge. But they look really nice, expecially tiled.

If you don't know how to do that...go here...

http://grayson.cgworks.com/tutorials/tile/index.html

Take care.

.

[jtk77]

I use targas if I am not using an RGB or a IFF with maya anyway, but I am not exactly a texture king

[goggle]

The major differences that I've encountered are that Tiff's are compressible with the LZW algorithm. I don't think TGA's are compressed at all. Also for the longest time a lot of programs read Tiff's in upside down and backwards (maya among those programs). Both TGA and Tiff DO have alpha channels.

The best thing to remember about file textures in Maya is that it likes them better if they are square and in some exponent of 2. like 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 and so on.

Technically Maya converts all of your file textures to BOTs (Block Ordered Texture) anyway right before rendering.

Hope this helps.

-James

[gmask]

I think tiff's compress better but otherwise it shouldn't make too much of a difference.

[jtk77]

for some reason i think TGAs are better color wise when ealing with RGB than TIFF..
vice versa for print .
but when it comes down to it, it all goes through maya and getts converted ..and I think RGBs and IFFs convert faster and use less memory in the process.
I could be wrong, not 100%

[gmask]

for some reason i think TGAs are better color wise when ealing with RGB than TIFF..
vice versa for print .

Well I think that is debatable.. as rgb should be rgb when you are talking about lossless image formats as long as they have the same gamma settings and bit depth.

Tiff can be 16bit and CMYK .. so for print Tif is going to be better and for film where 16bit files are used then tif has another advantage over targa. The only difference that I can think of that may sway in favor of targa is better handling of gamma but I can neither confirm or deny that.

However I will say that if you can use Maya's native iff format then that is best because it will use less memory.

Then if you have many large texture files you'd want to covnerty them to BOT files.

[jtk77]

is there a plugin for photoshop or a dos command line to do this? people have talked about converting to BOT files yourself but how would you use that in Maya?
Just curious the workflow

[gmask]

Naw there is not plugin for PS but it woul dbe nice if there was.. actually there is a commandlien option for Maya that converts all textures for you as well as the individual makebot MEL command. Pixho apparently wrote a noce little script but I haven;t check it out.

Bascially you'd only convert to BOT texture files that will not be revised frequently otherwise it's a pain.

[jtk77]

cool man, I will look it up

[deke-kincaid]

toolbot from pixho:
http://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/toolbox/mel/ma...toolBOT\_doc.htm

[brendanjbond007]

thanks to all who gave their comments on my previous curiocity. thanks to all

God Bless You

[feimage]

I think tiff's compress better but otherwise it shouldn't make too much of a difference.

i agree, so i stick with tiff image. and there are many tiff compression control that can help us compress tiff files and make it smaller but high resolution.