1) Obviously there's no standard texture resolution size and you should use which ever resolution gives you the best results. Having said that, does an 8k x 8k texture sound obscene for production quality renders? 8k doesn't look too bad at the distance those images below are at, but when I bring the camera closer, things start to crap out pretty fast. Unfortunately, do to the nature of the animations, I need to bring the camera fairly close to the model. I'm thinking about going even larger, but... question two!
2) Holy shit Maya slows to a crawl when I'm using big textures. I don't understand why having a large texture connected to a material slows the attribute editor to the point where it takes 15 seconds to change a single value. And don't get me started on the Hypershade... the thing is practically unusable. Maya 2010 didn't seem to have this problem to bad, but Maya 2012 is another story. I'm on a high end workstation with 16GB of RAM FFS! It probably doesn't help Photoshop is running in the background hogging 5.2 GB of memory =P
Any tips for increasing Maya's texture resolution? I mean, resolution is what it is... I noticed a huge jump in quality when I actually had high quality images to work with (Uh, 3dsk is awesome). But now I'm just trying to get the most bang for my buck bringing those into Maya.
EDIT:
I guess too that I could use several smaller resolution textures on the object. I hadn't thought of that.
Replies
As for the performance problem, that is sort of strange.. I mean 8k is big but video cards have been more than capable of displaying them for a long time now, it should not be choking on just one 8k texture. You wouldn't happen to have an ATI video card would you? If you do, try swapping in an NVidia card if possible and see if it gets better, if not just try updating video drivers and see if that helps. Actually either way try updating (or maybe downgrading!) video card drivers and see if anything changes.
I'll try getting the IT guys to update the Nvidia graphic drivers next week. Perhaps that's the issue. I'm also going to do that multiple UV map trick and use several 4k textures instead of one big one.
http://www.eklettica.com/index.html
Do I use multiple materials then for the character since I have multiple UV sets now? One for head, one for body? I see I can use the relationship editor to define which UV sets are used in one map slots, but seeing as I can't use multiple textures for color (for example), I'm not seeing another way to have two diffuses, two normals, etc. for the same model. Is this correct?
And wow... yeah, I would like to know that too.
What do you mean by detail map? A quick search didn't produce much besides normal map information.
As for the UV set thing, as far as I know yes, unfortunately you're going to have to use multiple materials now. I'm not completely positive on this, but you might be able to hook up at color/numerical values in the three copies up through expressions so that you only have to edit one and have that propagate out through the rest of them (except for the textures of course). There is also the possibility that simply using Mix2Color nodes to mix the maps together (making sure to assign each one their respective UV set) will also work. This would be way better since you'd have only one material so try this first actually.
Er, just remembered by the way that Mix2Colors probably still only works if you're rendering with Mental Ray. Don't know if there's a mixer node that works with Maya Software, there should be though.
Another thing I just remembered you can do is limit the max displayed viewport texture size in the preferences. You could probably tell it to limit the display of the 8k texture to only 4k or 2k in viewports, to see if it's really the video card choking on the 8k texture or Maya being dumb (aka Maya being Maya ).
With proper unwrap work, you could get the exact same level fo detail on a 2kx2k map.
You realize that 50% of an 8K is just 4x8k right? a 2k map is 1/16th the resolution of a 8k. So technically, no, you couldn't.
Now if he's just got a blurry mess with no real detail on a texture that large, then yes, but basics math tells you 2x2k doesn't = half of 8x8k.
Obviously im talking out of my ass and anyone should correct me.
EDIT: Also i notcied that your stubble is a part of your diffuse map, this would rarely be the case since you tend to create unique textures for that or simulate it using hair/fur
4096x4096 for the head.
4096x4096 for the body.
4096x4096 for the hands.
4096x4096 for the feet.
4096x4096 for each piece of unique clothing.
And the uv mapping is the same as game industry uv mapping.
complex shaders generally do the job of calculating how the objects surface interacts with the shots lights. you still need textures to describe the surfaces. (I have no film experience but I've done rendering for TV using mentalray)
Oh you.... It was just a generalization, lol. Hes wasting a lot of space he could fill up, is what I mean
one shader with uvlinking. so its easier to tweak instead of tweaking 2 shaders for the skin. You could even use a blend material as you main shader that holds all the other shader(cloth,skin,eye,hair..etc) thats how I did it when i was working at a vfx studio.
Visceral, yeah, definitely going to take out the stubble soon. I was too excited to see how things would turn out =]
And it's still more practical to use square textures, UV editors and such are all optimized for even proportions.