Bit depth issue and discussion

velendil

Hello everyone,

I'm recently digging through web to find some answers and ask few questions about bit depth in substance painter export. 

Recently topic about https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/tomb-raider-texturing-movie-hero-asset-rising-sun-pictures and my personal test bring me a thought abut sense of using 16bit textures painted in Substance Painter. 

To be honest, Is anyone using 16bit (RGB16) Base Color texture? And If yes, what are benefits of it exactly when you are creating your texture from scratch, I mean, no textures from textures banks or a something like this. Is it possible to se the difference on naked eye? 

Looking through web I've realized that mostly, 16bit helps with emission and of course normal/displacement. I run one issue when 16bit really helps me on soft but mostly flat surface, where difference in spec/high was subtle. But this is pretty obvious for me, that those additional steps really helped then.

Furthermore, even using  RGB16, is anyone using RGB16F? Or even RGB32F? Is there any sense without 16/32 bits input like scans or whatever? 

Right now I am doing some test with 8vs16 exports, and then will test it in Arnold renderer, because this is engine I am mostly focusing on right now. 

Lets discuss and hope you guys have some experience and stories abut choosing right depth. 

Moreover, I have different depth in my scene, I mean, for Channel, there are 8 and 16 bits. Is there any export preset which allows me to got both 8 and 16 bits as selected? Using png/exr/tiffs brings me everything to selected bits in export window (8 or 16). 

I've posted this originally at Allegorithmic's forum - https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,27264.0.html

Thanks in advance
Peter Nowacki

Bek

I strongly doubt anyone is using 16bit for base colour in games due to the vram cost. 16bit is probably quite rare even for normal maps. A few hero props might make use of them, but I would assume they're quite rare.

If you are targeting offline rendering, is memory as much of a constraint? I have no idea; I imagine it depends heavily on the project. If you think it's worth it, and it isn't slowing you down then sure, why not.

In Sub. Painter you can't export the same channel at differing bitdepths, no. I'm not sure why you'd ever need to do that, but if you do you're better off finding someone to batch process your exports via photoshop or similar. (so export at highest bit-depth, and have a tool that will convert them all to the lower bit depth).