Forum: MarketPlace Showcase


Subject: Hyperion Bar : Progress Update

Ajax opened this issue on Feb 28, 2005 ยท 29 posts


Ajax posted Tue, 01 March 2005 at 5:32 PM

Yep, the screens are jpegs in both versions. The tex scheme on the right has a simple metal jpeg tiled over the brown metal parts and a simple leather jpeg tiled over the seat and table top. They're the same sort of jpegs you find in the city blocks. The UV mapping isn't designed for tiling though. It's just that with P5 you can tile the textures anyway. Sometimes a scene with mostly procedural textures is faster to render, sometimes it isn't. Some procedural shaders can be very slow to calculate and others are very fast. Large jpegs tend to take a long time to load just before rendering but once they've loaded they render pretty fast. Procedurals have zero load time but can get slow during the actual render if they invole complicated nodes. The really important thing is that Poser tends to "choke" if you load too many high res jpegs in one scene. It can crash, refuse to render or render with some textures missing. Poser 4 does that too. P5 doesn't choke on procedurals though. I'm thinking most people will want a few Vickis and Mikes in their bar scene, plus clothes. That's probably going to mean a lot of textures before you even start counting the bar textures. For a large object like the bar you have basically three options: you can use very very high res jpegs to try and get detail; you can restrict the jpegs to things like screens, signs, lables etc and use procedurals everywhere else, maybe with some low res jpegs to drive the procedurals and control which areas show wear etc, or; you can use a heavily tiled UV mapping tile some low res jpegs across it. I prefer to avoid the very high res jpeg approach because of the choking issue. With P4, I think the best thing you can do is tile the UV mapping and use the low res jpegs tiled across the surface, but a lot of customers hate that, partly because you lose the ability to add specific details to specific areas and partly because a lot of them just don't really understand the concept of tiled texturing (they want UV templates they can look at and understand). I got tired of getting complaints and questions about the tiled approach, so though we do use that for the Dystopia City blocks, I've pretty much rejected it for anything else. The mostly-procedural approach seems to have a lot of advantages to me. That way I can keep the jpegs to a minimum and just use them for sceens etc or tile small pictures across areas where that's appropriate. So Poser won't choke but I also get to keep the intuitive UV template. And that means I can use a low res jpeg to control which areas show wear and tear, but make the actual wear and tear procedural, so I get high detail without the big jpegs. It's also faster to set up, which means I get the project finished faster and it's easier for me to make alternative colour schemes, since I can do it by just tweeking a few nodes... and (bonus!) making another colour scheme doesn't have to mean eating up another 20 Meg of the end user's hard drive. I could include a whole bunch of colour schemes without having much impact on the zip size. So to sum up, procedurals might be faster to render or might be slower depending on exactly how they're constructed, but the key thing is that they won't make Poser choke and if they're done right they'll look just as good as or even better than a really high res texture would.


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