Does Octane use image textures once even if they're used across different materials
Image textures are shared across different materials.
Is it better to use material instances multiple times rather than materials.
Material instancing is not a thing in octane. Both are converted to their own octane material.
You can use whatever is more convenient for you.
Woudl the size of a material make more of a difference over it's file size and format?
There is some material overhead, but I suspect it would not be significant enough.
Are virtual textures taken into account and would they help save vram?
Sadly no. Virtual textures are implement just like normal textures in octane.
joshuamkerr wrote:I'm just looking for a bit more info on ways to free up image texture memory. I have a city scene that uses quite a few different textures, buildings, cars, roads etc and I'm using about 3.5GB of image texture memory.
The best way to reduce texture data usage atm is to use smaller textures.
Additionally, Octane grabs the lowest lod there is for each texture (The largest lod version of a texture).
So reducing the highest lod can help out.
Look out for 4k/8k textures, they eat an extreme amount of data, eventhough you often dont need the precision.