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continuing education
Feb. 1st, 2006 07:04i've taken a couple of days out from cloth modelling to dive a bit (a shallow dive) into texture mapping (which means the application of 2D images to 3D objects). this'll be part of the cloth modelling once i get beyond the stage in which i am now, the part where the boring lambert shaders turn into rich and decadent fabrics from the orient, *heh*.
and i did some thinking about it, being as i've been lately exposed to the poser community, which has become enamored with high-resolution, " ultra-realistic" textures. such textures are expensive in terms of processing power. and i am hard up for that. so i went through calculating just exactly what resolution i'd need my texture maps for those clothes to be. i know there will be about 2 of you who care, *snicker*, the rest can stop reading here. and if you care about the paramour's report (and a picture) of passport woes and our resultant trip to victoria earlier today, you can read that instead.
if i am rendering at, say, 1024x768 to make an image i can admire on my desktop, it's immediately obvious that i don't need a 3000x3000 texture for anything, including the background, right? ok, it's really that simple from there on: just about how large is any object proportionately to the entire frame -- that's the resolution its texture needs to be to show up at maximum detail (i am presuming that texture is already adjusted to the object in question). if i am rendering the figure fairly large within the frame, and the skirt takes up about a third of the screen, that comes to about 342x256.
a couple of maya specifics: it likes textures square (they don't have to be, but it uses the memory anyway), and it likes them in multiples of 64. so i'll up the 342 to 384, it'll look just as good, and my CPU will be a lot happier than with a higher resolution. and this one's quite hidden: there's a default value of which you should be aware if you've fine-tuned your texture well: in the attributes for the file texture, under "effects" turn the filter down. its default of 1 blurs the texture slightly, which generally is useful to reduce pixellation, but it can be counter-productive if you've worked things out precisely to show enough detail for your render resolution.
and i did some thinking about it, being as i've been lately exposed to the poser community, which has become enamored with high-resolution, " ultra-realistic" textures. such textures are expensive in terms of processing power. and i am hard up for that. so i went through calculating just exactly what resolution i'd need my texture maps for those clothes to be. i know there will be about 2 of you who care, *snicker*, the rest can stop reading here. and if you care about the paramour's report (and a picture) of passport woes and our resultant trip to victoria earlier today, you can read that instead.
if i am rendering at, say, 1024x768 to make an image i can admire on my desktop, it's immediately obvious that i don't need a 3000x3000 texture for anything, including the background, right? ok, it's really that simple from there on: just about how large is any object proportionately to the entire frame -- that's the resolution its texture needs to be to show up at maximum detail (i am presuming that texture is already adjusted to the object in question). if i am rendering the figure fairly large within the frame, and the skirt takes up about a third of the screen, that comes to about 342x256.
a couple of maya specifics: it likes textures square (they don't have to be, but it uses the memory anyway), and it likes them in multiples of 64. so i'll up the 342 to 384, it'll look just as good, and my CPU will be a lot happier than with a higher resolution. and this one's quite hidden: there's a default value of which you should be aware if you've fine-tuned your texture well: in the attributes for the file texture, under "effects" turn the filter down. its default of 1 blurs the texture slightly, which generally is useful to reduce pixellation, but it can be counter-productive if you've worked things out precisely to show enough detail for your render resolution.
