Support WEBP images
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.
Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as alpha channel) at a cost of just 22% additional bytes. For cases when lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing 3× smaller file sizes compared to PNG.
A patch for blender has been submitted on Oct 31 2015 but is still waiting for a review: developer.blender.org/D1598
I am waiting for this file format to be supported in Blender and I hope that it will become more popular (and more used). Its specifications are really enticing.
It’s compression rate is amazing, whilst still keeping a great image quality. I think that it would even deserve to become a standard, as it can replace JPEG and PNG in many cases.
WEBP Info: developers.google.com/speed/webp
PNG to WebP - Comparing Compression Sizes: keycdn.com/support/png-to-webp
WebP encoding tool GUI: github.com/samuelcarreira/webPGUI
WebP file format plug-in for Photoshop (but you can open .webp files natively with krita): github.com/webmproject/WebPShop
Vote up if you want this file format to be added to blender.
6 Comments
It would be awesome to also be able to output directly animated WEBP images from Blender, without the need to render an images series before.
Can this be closed? The patch has landed developer.blender.org/D1598
I would say do not close this yet. After some testing you can import WebP but it still cannot export WebP images on export of 3D object. it instead converts to PNG or JPEG on export (tested with glb/gltf)
It surprises me that this hasn't already been addressed; WebP (and for that matter, WebM) is a wonderfully modern format. Additionally, I suspect that the majority of Blender users are ultimately uploading their final product onto the web, which the format was designed to address.
This could actually result into quite big memory savings and speedup during file saving also when using webp instead of .png as output format. Possibly the same case when reading the images into renderers?
This has seen some progress recently but not finished yet.