Tiled and MipMapped .tx textures support
The biggest drawback of Cycles since it's already very fast is memory consumption. Studio renderers like Arnold and RenderMan leverage .tx textures that are tiled and mipmapped so that they can use hundreds of 4k and 8k textures at rendertime but the renderer takes only a small portion of that data into RAM (VRAM) which is needed to render.
Currently, you can select .tx textures in Blender and they will be rendered but it still loads the full rez texture into RAM as there is no difference between using .tx or .png in Blender.
Arnold and others consider the size of a given object in an image being rendered so they load only a small version of the texture for distant objects e.g. (it could be even some 32x32 mipmap or less regardless of the original). And they also consider the visibility of the objects so that only those pieces (tiles) of the texture that are visible for the renderer, are actually loaded into the memory instead of the complete image.
Thus you can use 8k textures and not worry about RAM and especially VRAM which is much more limited. So the suggestion - Blender should fully utilize .tx textures and be able to create them.
4 Comments
Coming from Redshift which handles this really well has caught me out a few times where I just assumed that Cycles would do this also. Would be great to see!
Yes! Mipmaps would be pretty neat indeed!!
In fact, Blender currently support mipmap as you can see it in texture properties, under the sampling section. But this only allow Blender to generate mip-map for the texture. So this is the ridiculous point. Blender know how to write it but Cycles doen't know how to interprate it. We need to have the feature in Cycles. That should be the first priority in render task. Big project can't be render un gpu because off this missing feature.
Does blender 4.0 support MIP mapping? It looks like before Blender 3.0 MIP mapping was support. Are there plans for it to come back? or is it handled behind the scenes now?