OTOY Forums

Does it save ram to use the regular image load when using the same texture for color and bump (or spec, or what have you)?

I've been dinking around and I can't quite tell if I'm using more ram when I use floatimage in places where the bump or spec are the same as the color.

(Sorry if this question has been asked before, I couldn't find an answer).

if you use an image for both it will be the least ram consumed.
if you use an image for diffuse and a floatimage for bump, you have one copy of the color image and one copy of the blackandwhite image in video ram.

so in this case, use the same color 'imagetexture node' for both.

Radiance

That's what I suspected, but I figured it would be good to have the question answered here on the forum.

I'd also just like to say that Octane is the most fun I've ever had with a renderer and I've been doing this stuff since DKB Trace on an Amiga 1000.

nice tips.

(mumbles something about dds support)

beta3 will offer using a color image for both, using the alpha channel for bump or alpha.
that way you can use a color image for both diffuse and opacity, with the same amount of memory used as only one colour image, but increased render speed..

Radiance

interesting. in theory its possible then to use an image with multiple alphas in it?

understand wrote:nice tips.

(mumbles something about dds support)

+1 on that mumble!

DDS is not supported via the CUDA api, so i can't use it.
it would be a wonderfull solution for us, and the hardware supports it but the CUDA api does'nt. not yet.

Radiance

it would be a wonderfull solution for us, and the hardware supports it but the CUDA api does'nt. not yet.

Does NVIDIA already considered it ? Or they think nobody needs it ?
It would be a good idea to drop them a mail, just to know if they plan it or not.

At work we use a lot of DDS since we do real time scenes
Having support for DDS in CUDA would be really cool

The gain in memory is also huge