PAs... Please hold off on the 8k textures...
Malandar
Posts: 776
I understand that you want to make the best looking product that you possibly can, but how many customers actually have an 8k monitor and video card? Not many I think. All you are doing is setting up your customers to load your product and then wonder why their computer locks up. I have a Ryzen 7 3900X with 64 gigs of ram and an RTX 2060 Super and it can't do squat with the set I just bought that has 8k textures, because once you load the scene the computer bogs down with all cores cranked to max and all ram in use. You can't do anything with that unless you are sitting on a dual titan rig.
BTW, the set I am talking about is this one https://www.daz3d.com/post-apocalyptic-zone
I like how it looks and it is the right style for what I am wanting to do with it, but come on if you are going to give us 8k textures at least give us the option for 4k and probably 2k as well. otherwise I see a lot of returns in the future. (And yes I know that I can use scene optimizer or knock down the textures myself, but after buying the product should I really have to do it myself, just to be able to use it without crashing my system?)
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Comments
I dont think that set is entirely 8K, is it?
I know I have to use them when the floors etc look pixellated, so I think there are decent reasons.. but yea, use them sparingly I guess.
All it says is 640 Textures, Specular, Bump, Normal, and Transparency Maps (8192 x 8192 to 512 x 512 ) If it had had a warning about the need for a monsterously powerful system to run it, I would not have bothered.
I built this new system I have now specifically to use Iray, and so far it is pretty good 4k textures are no problem, but that thing has enough 8k to choke my system out and make it scream for mercy, just loading it and nothing else. There is no reason to be pushing 8k textures out when probably most people are still not even using 4k. All that is going to do is make people MAD and mad people do things like return products because they are unusable by them, I am still debating returning this.
What the PAs should do, if they want to include 8k textures is also include 4k textures and two presets, so that those with the systems that can handle it get 8k and those with average systems can still use the product.
In the meantime, you can manually downscale the textures before loading the scene. With a free program like Irfanview, you can batch resize the big files in a few clicks. Extra work, so that depends on how much you like the set.
Two sets of textures is a good idea.
I don't like busting out scene optimizer on some stuff, as I feel I can always tell the difference between 4K and its downgraded 2K. It destroys anything with text and curves in general, but you can send the time tracking down some textures to omit.
But I like buying stuff without 8Ks even less than using optimizer. You just feel it will look past it in 3 years time.
The downside to the texture sets, is then comments about the size of the downloads.. ;)
So put the texture sets in separate files, let the buyer download what they want to use, problem solved.
There won't be that many 8k files that need substitutes. Besides, there's no pleasing everyone.
Are you sure it's the textures that are causing the problem and not the massive amount of geometry loaded into the scene? How many 8k textures are there included? The product description doesn't give a count, so could only be one (and likely is...the ground I'm guessing). 8k textures are bigger, but an 8k .jpg isn't *that* much larger in mb than a 4k .jpg. I've been rolling with a mixture of 4k and 8k textures in gaming for years (I mod games like Skyrim, etc). But for Daz, I've noticed quite a few sets include 8k ground textures so as to help with tiling and detail repetition.
It's also misleading terminology so I can see why there is a lot of confusion (it happens in the game modding scene too), but you don't need an 8k monitor to make use of an 8k texture. An "8k texture" just means that the texture is 8192 pixels on at least one side.
You are comparing file sizes of compressed file formats... That is not how much memory they will use, not to forget the related 4 or 5 maps at the same resolution and maybe even same color depth. 8k uncompressed at 24bit = 192MB per file, plus the size of the maps and you have almost 1GB:s worth of texture+maps for just one material.
Ok, if it is for a reason (large surface), but I have seen a case where such textures+maps were used on a surface where UV was a rectangle covering just 4900 pixels by 290 pixels of the 8192x8192 area - The texture and maps were not used for anything else, which was also evident by how the un-used area was filled with garbage (extending/bleeding the edges of the used area to cover the rest)
It may be that this type of UV mapping and texturing is related to some modelling program, but so far I haven't found enough evidence to find it.
its the texture sizes
I have some scenes by a particular vendor with 8K ones on ridiculously small objects I need to use scene optimiser on because my hardware cannot cope, made a thread on the topic. geometry it is not fussed.
a great example of how it can be done is Rougey and Strangefate's Red Crow inn, while the geometry is massive they have 3 texture size options and the lowest renders very fast!
Rather than asking PAs to restrict texture sizes, tools like this should absolutely be in your arsenal regardless because you should be managing the amount of memory that goes on your videocard no matter the size:
Scene Optimizer
When a scene doesn't fit on my now ancient 1080, I run this tool and pick textures I either don't need for the render because they're not the focus or reduce texture sizes... then the scene runs without issue. And it's on sale today so it's worth getting instead of asking PAs to restrict their products.
This is a good point. On the other side of the coin, I've avoided products that had poor textures/really teeny textures because I'm lazy and it's a lot of work to have to go through and retexture an entire set, even if you're just using shaders (you need to find the right one, get the tiling right, etc etc etc)(and sometimes a shader doesn't cover it because what you might be trying to fix is a mapped object and doesn't react well to a tiled shader). But I won't ever avoid a set that has great texturing in terms of detail...because I can always run it through scene optimizer and cut out what I don't need for the individual piece I'm working on. I very much appreciate Rogey's multiple levels of detail. It's something I could do myself via Scene Optimizer, but having the options out ofthe box is awesome.
640 textures are a lot though. Having extra smaller sets would make that download file size even bigger. I would not purchase this set specifically because of the 640 textures or it having 2k and 4k options.
I don't see the issue much with 8k textures since I could easily shrink ones I don't need for close-up details. The problem is that some texture maps are inefficiently made. Some texturing programs save out all those mats per material zone and people just leave it like that. Or the PA didn't UV map the items to have multiple material zones in the same square.
Like others have said here, I prefer to have the option of larger texture sizes where needed (ie for a wall/floor etc), but 8K for a small vase is an overkill, although you could be rendering that vase in extreme close up, so there is always a use case for that as well. I know people have said how they struggle to use Scene Optimizer but I personally find it extremely easy to use, in just a minute or so I can optimise my scene to fit on the card.
the texturing on that product needs a lot of work, 8k or otherwise, tbh
An 8K texture does not necessarily result in an 8K image. For one example, if you use an 8K HDRI, you're only ever seeing half the HDRI. For another, a single 8K map could be used to texture multiple different objects or parts of a single object. If you joined all the different maps of a Genesis 8 figure into a single 8K map, you'd actually end up with LESS resolution than keeping them separate (and you'd still need four of them to account for the different types of maps).
Something i learned using Ansiko. products the sets are beautifully done. But are huge in tex maps size.& Most of their products Normals maps are larger than the texture maps in size. if you remove the normal maps from the scene being renderd it will greatly improve your rendering speed and vram usuage. I have no idea why normal maps need to be so big I've been changing them from PNG to JPG to reduce the wieght size of them by more than half and getting the same results . But if your creating animation you don't need the normal maps anyway. jst a simple cheat to improve vram
I don't buy products that aren't optimized. Yes I can do that myself and do so often but these days I have more options so I pass on most content that has overly large textures.
In game development, you often have LOD versions of the same asset... LOD = Level Of Detail
This is the stage we're getting to in DAZ because creators are keen to explore the cutting edge while many of the customers do not have the latest super computers.
Technically they are optimized, just optimized for texture quality not for VRAM used.
Can the scene optimizer also crop the textures to the UV boundaries, as reducing the resolution of the texture+maps isn't always an option. The tiny part of the texture which was actually used in my case couldn't be reduced without loosing necessary detail (not even doing closeups).
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/427316/uv-map-and-material-optimizer
I think this is the root of the problem.
One common indication in these cases has been the existence of large resolution+colour depth metallicity maps that are just one colour (black), another that can clearly be seen, especially in normal maps, is the striped pattern that's filling the non-used areas of the map, the pattern runs perpendicular to the UV cloud's edges and uses the colors from those edges - Which modeling/texturing program does these?
Doing a photo search with a normal map, I found some examples originating from Substance Painter that had the same kind of striping pattern, but it was too few samples to be sure.
Without the existence of the indicative one colour metallicity map, the same problem could be created if one took a nicely filled UV map and assigned each and every one of the 20-30 UV clouds their own materials (different textures and every possible map for whatever and more) => Hundreds/thousands of high resolution textures and maps that would bring a supercomputer down to it's knees, when exactly the same level of detail could be achieved with better UV mapping and material handling
You would have to remap the object for that, not just crop the texture.
I'm all for different sets of textures that can be downloaded separately. For me it's not just about render speed but also disk space.
I HAVE Scene Optimizer, but why should I have to jump through hoops just to use a product that I paid good money for that only people with NASA computers can use?
Going through the textures, the only 8K ones I've found so far are for the ground and half of those maps (normal, color, height, etc) are filled simply with the striping pattern mentioned above.
there is a PA who does interiors who is crazy for them in every channel, I couldn't figure out why the hell I struggled to render their scenes until I realised, you are fortunate not to have encountered it yet
Ten years ago, I struggled with the limitations of my hardware. I hid unseen bodyparts, deleted whatever wasn't immediately in view, etc., used low resolution figures in the background and created my own billboards all just to get a render finished. And here we are again. I feel that this is always going to be the status quo. That's why there are products like Scene Optimizer, Camera View Optimizer, and Resource Saver Shader Collection.
I suppose this is a never-ending race. But on the positive side, it creates a whole ecosystem where other PA's can make their living of
Back when I had a crap computer, I did that too, but I don't have a crap computer now. I shouldn't have to so something like that just so I can LOAD a scene that now that I look at it has way too much bump, and has scene elements that spill out off the ground plane provided, and has random spikes where my Ryzen 7 CPU is maxed out, even when I am doing NOTHING. I think I am going to return it and save myself a load of hassle.
Well, smaller texture set sizes is just a bandaid on the problem. We want realism and details until we get them and then it's, no thanks. For the 3D hobby, even entry level video cards need 32GB RAM; so maybe in 3 years at the best if the video game manufacturers really start using these ray tracers and using lots of video RAM.
Not that I don't sympathize, I just changed my video card to a GeForce GTX 1650 Super 4GB so I can render faster but the only scene I'm made in the last two weeks that fits into it is using Favreal's French Village Bundle. The scenes I made using newer iRay shader material sets are all too large for the video RAM.