This tutorial uses a simple scene of a wooden floor to illustrate the benefits of using maketx to preprocess your textures. The tutorial is split up into the following pages:
To get the best from Arnold, it is strongly recommended that you convert images to tiled, MIP-mapped textures. High-resolution unmipped texture maps are very inefficient to render because the highest resolution level must be loaded into memory regardless of the distance rather than a lower resolution level. Likewise, untiled texture maps are also very inefficient because they must be loaded entirely into memory as soon as the renderer needs to access a single texel. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to reduce the render time by less than half.
FORMAT | AUTO-MIPMAP | RENDER TIME | FILE I/O | PEAK CACHE MEMORY |
---|---|---|---|---|
JPG | On | 43s | 4m 10.4s | 394.9 MB |
JPG | Off | 36s | 1m 47.1s | 173.5 MB |
TX | - | 20s | 0m 0.6s | 34.5MB |
Note: A quicker way to convert textures to .tx is to use the TX Manager.