OTOY Forums

I was wondering if there was a particular recommended image type for optimisation purposes. For instance, in LW, it is best to use PNG but not sure with OCante. I want to have the absolute minimum memory used for the maximum colour information .

Hi Gordonrobb,

Textures in octane are stored uncompressed in the GPU's VRAM so the specific format you use is not really important at render time. The memory usage is related to the number of channels, so choosing the right type to load the texture as is important. ie: for an opacity mask load the .png as an octane "alpha image" and it will be efficient as it will only load the alpha channel (not RGB). For a greyscale bump map, load it as a floatimage so that it's only loaded as single channel. If LW likes PNG then I would stick with PNG. If you have an RGBA .png and you want to use it for diffuse and opacity then load it as an octane "image" (in the diffuse channel) and as a "floatimage" (in the opacity channel) and octane should be efficient too, loading the texture only once and using the different channels for the different purposes (you should also see the texture count only go up one, rather than two).

Thanks
Chris.