1 material and 16K image or 16 materials rotating smaller? Tweet

[scooternva]

1. I have a circular surface that is going to have a planar normal map applied along its Y axis. I have two choices: either one material for the entire disc that uses one large 16,384 x 16,384 image, or 16 materials spun around the Y axis that use the same copy of a smaller 1,024 x 16,384 image map that gets reused and rotated for each wedge-shaped material. Question: does Octane load an image file once per model, or does it load an image over and over again for each material that uses it? If it’s the latter, I would rather create one large 16K x 16K normal map that has more variation to it, rather than cloning and spinning a smaller normal map that won’t save me any memory.

2. Ever since LightWave 9.6, I have had it drilled into my head that image maps should have dimensions that are a multiple of 8 (e.g., 256 x 256, not 256 x 258) for the sake of memory usage efficiency. Question: is the "multiples of eight" rule of thumb something that also applies to the dimensions of images used in the OctaneRender Texture Image node?

Thanks!

(edited to clarify a couple of items)

[juanjgon]

As far as I know, you can use any texture resolution without losing memory efficiency, and Octane will load the texture files only once, even if the same map is used from several materials or objects.

Thanks,
-Juanjo