And the prize for craziest Iray texturing goes to...
andya_b341b7c5f5
Posts: 694
...I'm not telling, to save the vendor's blushes, but here's how they used 15.5Gb of memory for a single small room environment and overwhelmed my 8Gb GTX980M.
- Everything has a 4k texture in every available channel, no matter how small the item is - even if it's the size of a pencil.
- Flat surfaces get a 4k bump map, a normal map, a spec map and a roughness map - all 4k. Yep, flat surfaces - even panes of window glass. The bump/roughness are just islands of uniform mid gray on a white backgound. The normal map is a uniform purple.
- Every texture is saved with an RGB color space, including the ones that could/should be grayscale - bump, roughness, spec, etc.
- Surfaces that are a single plain color have a 4k diffuse map in that color, while the Base Color is set to white.
All a bit over the top, and irritiating to have to spend time removing the pointless maps, updating to grayscale and downsizing some of the others so I can actually render it on the GPU. Is there a texturing application out there that just dumps out every conceivable type of image map for every surface in a scene? I can imagine it would be tempting to use that, but it's unhelpful to load them all as part of the default preload of the room and its props.
Perhaps we should have an indication on product pages of how much memory a product needs to render in default form? At least then we would know we'll have to tinker with before we can render it, or invest in another tool from the store to do this tedious bit for us first.
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I couldn't really tell you what the thought process was without knowing the product. However, PBR painting programs like substance and 3dcoat do multi-map exporting, which can be problematic if they're just using a stock export preset. If they're using an export preset that includes normals, but none of their painted materials use normals, they will just get a neutral normal map.
That seems a bit over the top, to say the least :P
This is where https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer comes in. It scans the scene, shows a list with used maps + sizes, and buttons and tools to quickly resize or remove textures. If you don't have a lot of memory it is a MUST buy.
You can open a help ticket and report it so the vendor is at least aware of the issues. They do sometimes fix these problems in a product update or know not to make the same mistake in their next product.
THIS!!!!! I have had it with PAs that think that the stock subtance painter properties that work well in apps like Maya and Maz are perfect for DS and Iray There are 2 well known PAs I no longer purchase from because they use SP with their releases and in order to use them in any reasonable way I need to go thru and rework the whole shader/material setup to remove the extra textures and settings that really are not needed in order to get a product to perform well. Frankly it's time consuming and I am done with it no matter how great their products are.
Scene optimizer is great as are the free texture resizing scripts, but it's made some PAs lazy and less accountable for their design decisions IMO
I have mentioned my issues to both the PAs I no longer purchase from on release threads and they totally dismissed it saying this is 2018, this is the industry standard and you should have a computer that can handle this line. So I doubt a support ticket will make a difference
Personally I prefer a too high qualty to a too low quality (which I see often also with newer items). After all you can always reduce the quality, but the's no way to make it better if it's poor.
An option (which some already use) is two or more sets of textures of different size/quality, it requires more work so it may increase the price, personally I don't mind paying extra for good quality though.
I know exactly what you mean. you outta try using some of these iray only sets in animation projects, it would take me years to render a 10 second scene out with some sets if i didn;t re do the textures and bumps. . what I have started doing is once i get the sets reworked and textured, I over write the original set with the proper maps that I can use ove and over . my problem was solved that way. though it should have to be that way for something you pay so much for. I guess its like some products are sold as iray only. either you buy them because you like or need the product and fix it so you can use it or you don't buy it and go without it. I rather correct whats wrong and over right the files even if its a pain in the Tuchus if i need the product. which is how i buy things now days on a need bases and not on impulse buys
I think the complain here isn't the quality it's that they are literally useless like normal maps that are a pure solid color.
Of course, maps and stuff that's not needed should not be included, but for DAZ pretty promos that sell seem to be more important than how well things work technically. A lot of the QA work could be automated using scripts, checking for and fixing something like a correct library folder structure for example is simple, using a script. I just got an extra G3F "Character" folder in my library because a vendor missed the "s" in "Characters".
One of the reasons for this situation is of course the low profit on many products, if customers were willing to pay more for the products vendors could afford to spend more time on their stuff, and DAZ could hire some more people for QA work (just one extra person could probably make a huge difference).
...while I don't do animation, I still don't care for long render times either as that level of texture size along with the geometry would likely dump to the CPU even from my 12 GB Titan-X.
I thought the purpose of Substance was to be able to make PBR materials that where easily seemlessly tiles so as to avoid 4K texture components. If there then are aberations on a surface that would break the seemlessness of the PBR materials those are placed in the bump, normal, or displacement maps or all three. Whichever of those that was empty and best suited I guess. That would be what Algorithmic is being paid to design to make it easy for their customers.
OK.
I have noticed Substance Painter often produces bump and normal maps that look of plain color, but when ”auto contrasted” in Photoshop, they do have information that provide microstructure SP materials often have. If that is necessary for normal renders, I don’t know. I usually remove maps that doesn’t change the result enough for other than close-up shots.
I see the point that image maps should be high quality because you can always reduce quality (and hence size) but you cannot readily increase quality. What I would like is for textures of more sensible quality to be used in the full scene preload. Nothing is in close up there. It would show greater thought and care from the vendor. This looks like a 'hit the button to dump every possible texture at 4k and I'm done' approach, which leads to the numerous textures that have no function at all being included. Applications like Substance Painter should be smart enough not to produce textures as RGB that could obviously be grayscale.
I accept that cost to the vendor may be a factor in this type of approach. It wouldn't cost much to have an indication of the memory requirements for the default full scene preload on the product page: just a statement that it will need 'at least N Gb of memory' would help in the buying decision.
I could have returned this product, but it does meet a particular need I have. I still have the feeling I am doing some of the vendor's work for them! I probably won't buy another of theirs. I could raise a support ticket; Daz might feed back to the vendor. I'm not hopeful of anything more.
I'll pick up the Scene Optimizer at the next opportunity funds allow, likewise Mattymanx's new Resource Saver Shaders product. I must track down the scripts to downsize textures.
The thing is, Substance Painter _does_ create grayscale for things like Metallicity and Bump. I'm not sure how someone would have made RGB for these maps from SP, but in following the thread I think people are making a lot of assumptions about what vendors are or aren't doing. If you are seeing RGB maps where they should be grayscale, that might suggest it's not a SP output.
Also the thread started not with 'blank maps' but with 'these maps are unnessarily big,' so there's a few crossed streams.
I've seen a number of products with things like 'all black Metallicity map' and it makes me nuts, but maps like that are often something like 200k, so it's not like they significantly matter to texture load. Just, well, esthetically annoying. Heh
Size is tricky, because it really depends on what sort of image you are doing. Maybe somebody WANTS a high quality pencil so you can do a closeup of an ant crawling on a pencil tip... which is where Scene Optimizer becomes really handy, because desired map resolution is situational.
I don’t buy sets with big textures. Even with scene optimizer it takes time for me to run and gigs of textures clog my hard drive and I’m running low. For what I do, standard resolutions are fine. I would prefer if textures were optimized so the important stuff has more detail.
I recommend my product Resource Saver Shaders Colleciotion for Iray - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray - Full of quick and easy options to strip all textures on such surfaces and replace them with a simple colour setup with some spec and gloss so its not flat and boring and more.
Stuff like that should get returned and make the remarks clear of the reason. That's the only way Daz and the vendor can know that it is unacceptable and not usable. Work arounds might solve the issue for the user but information might correct the problem at the source.
If I'm modeling a book to include in a scene, I don't know how a customer might use it: if it will only be visible in the distance, sitting on a table; as a large, important book held in a character's hands; or as a giant-sized backdrop for a scene out of Super-Why or the Smurfs or house trolls or something. In order to avoid disappointing the customer, what's the best thing to do? Should I put low-res textures on, in order to save memory, and expect that the customer will have to replace them in order to make a prop huge or bring the camera in for an extreme closeup? Is it generally considered best behavior to include the lowest-resolution textures possible?
I'm not being argumentative. This is a serious question about something I'm currently clueless about.
For me, the ideal would be for the product to include a high rez option for close ups (it could be all high rez and up to me to take care of anything not used for the render) and a lower rez option for wide angle shots that don't need the high rez. But if I only have one choice, I want as high a resolution as I can get, as I always render above 6000x3800, and do mostly reasonably close up shots. For me, personally, if a product in the store only has low resolution textures (such as the older products that are being pushed in the current PC+ Sale), I usually pass by and ignore it, as it takes too much work to get it to a useable point.
I am fine with a 4096 x 4096 quality Diffuse mape and a normal map at the same quality, what the book doesn't need is a 4096 x 4096 Metallicity map, Diffuse Roughness map, Glossy Layered weight map, Glossy Color map, Glossy Reflectivity map, Glossy Roughness map, Top Coat Weight map, and Top Coat Roughness map, this is what I have been dealing with and that is just complete overkill for most things and un-needed in DS
I have consideed that many times, but when other users in release threads are praising the PA and the product, it makes me wonder if they are using the product differently than me, have no clue about these types of things or have a better pc than my i7 6700K system, but I think that is what I will start doing from now on.
I'd take a look at Stonemason sets. He's been doing this for a while and what he can get away with, you can too. You're not gonna find many 4096 maps, if so they will be for huge objects, not books surely. Even with a book somehow ending up being the center piece of a render, which is unlikely to begin with, an edge case hardly worth covering IMO, I doubt a 2048 map would't be enough for that.
I think if somebody wants a book as the centrepiece of their render and wants large textures, then they probably need to be looking to buy something where a book is the centrepiece of the product (and even then they should feel justified in expecting that any parts of the model which are just an expanse of a single colour would not have normal maps etc). I don't believe that a book that is far from being the centrepiece of the product that it's a part of should be expected to have massive textures. Buy a standalone model of a book if that's what you really want, and expect to make compromises if you don't and use a book is a small part of a much larger set.
As for the product creators, I don't think that being a Substance Painter user should be an excuse either. It's a fabulous product, and even if you're not being plain lazy and check through to see if everything it's produced is absolutely necessary to your model, it's still a massive time saver. It's a brilliant and effective tool for the texture artist, but it's a very flawed replacement for him.
Thank you all for the responses! :-)
The problem here is the enormous amount of differently skilled customers You might face... some would buy a book because of it's model's look and morphs and put their own textures on it for the project they want to do. Others lacking skill and/or time need a completely textured book fitting their project. These will only buy if there are good textures suiting their imagination...
So in the end it depends on you ^^
Some PAs can make half a city with a 100mb, other waste all those resources on a bookshelf. Neither is wrong. But there is a choice. A decision made.
If you want a book for closeups, then buy a set dedicated to a book for close ups. If you want a library full of books, expect the books to be reasonably nodelled for their purpose of sitting on a shelf collecting pixelized dust.
Everything in 3D is about tradeoffs. Detail versus scope, you can't have both. PAs that also have game industry experience tend to handle resource management better, because they understand the tradeoff necessary.
You can in fact have both. An option for a preset that loads a high resolution model and texture and a preset that loads a low resolution model and texture. Daz Studio is fully capable of using the same model at different resolution and subdivision. Iray itself is also capable of doing some optimization. Iray Advanced settings has a texture compression feature.
http://blog.irayrender.com/post/54506874080/saving-on-texture-memory
Programs can be created to optimize as needed. Games do this already. Some games have dynamic resolutions scaling. What this does is reduce the resultion of the image when needed to maintain a certain frame rate. There are other features that compress or scale things in the same way.
I bought a product yesterday that has bump maps and displacement maps in the surfaces, but sets the corresponding values to 0. What is the point of that?
One thing content creators learn very quickly is you can never be sure where the end user will be rendering from,and so texture resolution is an obvious issue..yea you could go procedural..but then it will invariably look procedural.
That wall at the edge of the set you couldn't be bothered detailing or fixing the stretched uv's on..that's what the end user will be rendering in full 4k glory, Or the rooftop you never thought anyone would ever get close to,that's where they will place the character and render in ultra close up.that section of terrain you struggled to get textured in good rez..they're gonna render an ant in full screen walking across that terrain.
things like greyscale control maps being sent out as RGB is infuriating though,I'm sure I've been lazy and made the same mistake..but control maps have no color so should be greyscale,they can also often be half the size of your color and normal maps.
I sometimes see that happening in Poser items that are converted to D|S format and then just left like that, without any manual changes. The auto-conversion even after all this time still has a few glitches in it.