JPG or TIF for diffuse material?

[Streetwise]

What are folks using for source textures? My client has 150dpi TIFF files for 3000x3000 render output. I'm thinking that's overkill? Would 72dpi JPG files work as well?

[damaggio]

For film work I use mostly jpg 72 above 2k and always tiff 16 for bumps or displacement,but this can vary depending on the asset and camera shot .Is your work for print?

[joconnell]

Dpi as a concept doesn't matter for 3d, only the amount of pixels for your width / height. One rule of thumb is if the object you're using the texture for is taking up 100% of the render, then you'd want the texture to be about double the amount of pixels it'll be seen at. So say you're doing a render that's 2000 x 2000 pixels and you've got a plane that takes up most of the shot, the texture on the plane would want to be 4000 pixels x 4000 pixels to feed the renderer with enough detail. Say you render the same scene but your render is now zoomed in on the middle 50% of the plane, now you'd need to double your texture size again to keep the same level of crispness.

Jpgs can be fine once they weren't compressed too much when they were created as that'll throw away detail in an effort to make files smaller so you could have blurry / mushy bits in your texture.

[Streetwise]

So my texture map is starting out as 10800x7200 (150dpi) but when I dumb it down to 72dpi, it's 5184 x 3456. We always output to 3000x3000 mainly for web. So joconnell , you're saying I shouldn't go smaller than 9000x6000 (125dpi)? (I would then save to JPG, quality 10 and be done.)

Thanks.

[joconnell]

forget DPI entirely as a concept for 3d since there's no dots or inches as such, there's only pixels in screen land. And yep, if the object that you're going to use the texture on was filling the screen you'd ideally want to have it feed in double the amount of info so you don't get any blurriness - a lot of it depends on what the texture contains too, like if it's a pattern that has loads of tiny fine lines, downsampling / downrezzing the image from 10800 pixels to half of that means you've got less fine detail in your texture, then again if it's something more organic you might get away with something smaller.

Back to the original question of jpg though, if it's you making them yourself, you don't get much benefit from going below quality 10 aside from saving a tiny bit of hard disk space, all that might happen is if you introduce some artifacts from the jpeg compression that you see in your render which you might then need to fix / re-render.

[Streetwise]

Thanks joconnell . Yes, I understand about the irrelevance of dpi here. (I added it in my thread as a point of reference.) Anyhow, the materials in question are wood laminates used on furniture for interior renders. So you do have subtle wood grains, etc. I am prepping the materials myself and got to thinking that either JPG at 10-12, or TIF LZW might be a good way to go as we frequently have to supply other vendors with the files. 200-400mb laminate files are kind of klunky to send around I just want to know what is overkill. Sounds like it's maybe best to stick with the larger 10800 source files, but then maybe okay to save out as JPG at 10? Maybe TIF LZW gives me the same size. I'll have to look at that.

[joconnell]

Yeah indeed - you'll have to judge them visually to make sure that you're not damaging the image in any way.

For your own work too, there's a very handy format for really high res textures called either tx or multi res exr. You feed in any image (or a folder of images) that you want to convert and say it's a 2000 pixel image, the utility will create a new file that keeps the 2048 pixel image but also downscales it to 1024, then again to 512, 256, 128 and lastly 64 by default. All of these options are saved into a single image. If you then load this file using the standard vrayhdri / vraybitmap (in vray 5) loader then the renderer will check how far away from camera the texture is being used at, and if it's off in the distance, it'll pick a much lower resolution than the full one since it doesn't need all that data. Likewise if it's used up close, you'll get the full res image.

If you've got a library of textures that you use all the time, woods, stones, etc it can make your renders a bit lighter on memory - we run out of memory all the time and rely on this a lot, if this is never an issue for you then ignore!

[Buck]

exr files generally. and resolution depends on what it's used for. 1k-16k depending on the need.

[soulburn3d]

I save a working file as psd for all my textures (since I frequently have to go back and edit them later), and then save out either tifs or png files as the format vray actually reads. Png if the texture is small (like 512x512), and tif if large (simply because of saving times, if I have an 8000x8000 image that I need to save dozens of times as I tweak the texture, saving a png each time is REALLY slow, whereas a tif, while larger on the harddrive is super quick to save). I'd really avoid jpgs, even when you think that the artifcating isn't too bad at a quality of 10-12, I tend to find too many instances where the artifacts will bite you in the butt, especially if the image is really contrasty like a mask or graphic / stylized image.

I know that you can't easily email a tif But I'd get a dropbox or google drive and put the large files there if your client need em.

Anyways, just how I do things, your mileage may vary.

- Neil