Answered: dDo Painter on 8k Maps
I've been working on a project where I'm using 8k maps for a model and have hit a bit of a problem with it, mostly when using DDO Painter.
Whenever I go to paint any masks, I hit a whole load of stability problems, however I'm more than ready to accept that I'm just getting my hardware to work harder than it can. Sometimes I can get to painting on the object and this will work for a while then suddenly my screen will flicker off, things will continue to run in the background though. However, I can only do a hard reset at this point, no amount of sitting, waiting, wishing gets me back to where I was. This results in a lot of lost paint work on masks, especially with the changes only truly being saved when you 'accept' the new mask. Sometimes Photoshop will recover the mask PSB but it really is only sometimes.
It also has a tendency to crash (break?) in the same way if I resize the 3DO window too quickly. Yeah, really. If I drag the corner super slow, I can get the window smaller to save my GPU some work, but if it moves too fast, black screen (I presume this is my graphics card driver crashing hard, I don't even see the notification beforehand).
Now, I'm already working with half/quarter res previews in 3DO so the model shouldn't actually be showing anything above 4k (and most of the time it's at 2k for the sake of stability). The problem is definitely once I start painter, I presume it's showing me the full res mask mapped onto the 3D object. Which is awesome in some respect, I do see the purpose of it being this way, but it does this regardless of whether I'm in paint full shaded or quick mask mode. I think this may be what's causing the suite (and my PC) to crash so often once I start working on a mask. I can change reflectance values, transfer modes and opacity levels etc. in the layer manager of DDO without any problems.
My PC has an i7-4790k with a 4GB Nvidia 970GTX and 16GB Ram. Hardly wimpy, but not exactly a workstation powerhouse. Is there any recommended way to get around this problem, say with a Multi Tile UV workflow? If anyone knows how to go about that using Quixel I'd love to hear; though I imagine it involves working on sections of the model one at a time in 3DO and wouldn't allow you to work on the entire set of tiles all at once. I do want to continue using Quixel, but I also want to be creating maps larger than 4k with stability since it started supporting it.
Whenever I go to paint any masks, I hit a whole load of stability problems, however I'm more than ready to accept that I'm just getting my hardware to work harder than it can. Sometimes I can get to painting on the object and this will work for a while then suddenly my screen will flicker off, things will continue to run in the background though. However, I can only do a hard reset at this point, no amount of sitting, waiting, wishing gets me back to where I was. This results in a lot of lost paint work on masks, especially with the changes only truly being saved when you 'accept' the new mask. Sometimes Photoshop will recover the mask PSB but it really is only sometimes.
It also has a tendency to crash (break?) in the same way if I resize the 3DO window too quickly. Yeah, really. If I drag the corner super slow, I can get the window smaller to save my GPU some work, but if it moves too fast, black screen (I presume this is my graphics card driver crashing hard, I don't even see the notification beforehand).
Now, I'm already working with half/quarter res previews in 3DO so the model shouldn't actually be showing anything above 4k (and most of the time it's at 2k for the sake of stability). The problem is definitely once I start painter, I presume it's showing me the full res mask mapped onto the 3D object. Which is awesome in some respect, I do see the purpose of it being this way, but it does this regardless of whether I'm in paint full shaded or quick mask mode. I think this may be what's causing the suite (and my PC) to crash so often once I start working on a mask. I can change reflectance values, transfer modes and opacity levels etc. in the layer manager of DDO without any problems.
My PC has an i7-4790k with a 4GB Nvidia 970GTX and 16GB Ram. Hardly wimpy, but not exactly a workstation powerhouse. Is there any recommended way to get around this problem, say with a Multi Tile UV workflow? If anyone knows how to go about that using Quixel I'd love to hear; though I imagine it involves working on sections of the model one at a time in 3DO and wouldn't allow you to work on the entire set of tiles all at once. I do want to continue using Quixel, but I also want to be creating maps larger than 4k with stability since it started supporting it.
Replies
Unfortunately, your hardware meets what I would consider to be the minimum requirements for 4k painting. 16 GB of RAM can be sluggish depending on the amount of layers being used across the different maps in your dDo project. I definitely don't recommend trying 8k painting with 16GB, but if you do, here's some ideas to attempt to improve performance:
Close all other programs while using the Suite
Lower your Photoshop history states to 5 or lower - this will free up available RAM
Flatten textures with the dDo menu (non-destructive, can be unflattened later)
Lower 3DO's undo count via the 3DO performance menu (In painting mode -> top right of 3DO -> Performance -> Lower undo to 5 or lower or disable entirely)
Other ideas would be to break your model up into two mesh groups, each laid out with unique UVs for 4k maps. You could also look into adding RAM to 32GB. You should be able to paint 8k maps at that resolution without too much trouble.
You mention splitting into two mesh groups; is this just like using a UDIM workflow and utilising multiple 0,1 UV spaces?
It would be similar to UDIM, yes - except the groups would share the same UV space within 0-1. Two detached objects (using Max terminology) should have their UVs set to fill the 0-1 space for each object.