Dumb question, I'm sure!

What is the best way to reduce texture sizes? If I change the scale to .5 in X and Y, does this have the same effect as bringing the texture in to a photopaint program and reducing it, at least memory wise?

The reason I ask is I have a system with 2 GB RAM, and i have a scene with 239,000 polygons that is crashing Vue5Inf. Admittedly, the textures are all hi-res. There are 138 seperate textures. I would like to just be able to use the scale function on all textures when I can if that helps. I will say I did try it, and the scene didn't crash on me; but it didn't always crash so I don't know if I fixed it or not.

Thanks in advance!

John

One thing you can try is to 'collapse' all materials that are sharing the same textures. If you are not going to edit them separately, you can open the material summary, and symply copy/paste similar materials oto one another. Or you can drag and drop materials the same way. Be careful though, the operation is not easily reversible. Other than that, you will have to reduce the size of your textures in photoshop and reload each reduced size texture map. Reducing the scale in Vue will only reduce the 'zoom' factor on a texture - it will not affect the resolution of the original bitmap.

That is what I expected. I wonder whether I can make a script to automatically do that for all textures in a batch in Photoshop CS2 or Photopaint? I just might!

"i have a scene with 239,000 polygons that is crashing Vue5Inf. Admittedly, the textures are all hi-res. There are 138 seperate textures." Well, this I think clears any doubt if to blame memory leaks to polygons or to bitmaps! :-) Anyway, I will add to what Agiel wisely said, that those who have the privilege to own Photoshop 8 or higher, can take advantage of "bicubic sharper" mode, which is excellent for resizing bitmaps. i don't know other programs such as PSP, but it's possible that they too have similar features.

John you can surely record a simple action in PS and batch perform it on your Vue scene folder. I generally don't do that because I rarely have to do with more than 15-20 bitmaps in a scene, but if you have to handle 138 of them, well, I can see a definitive advantage in batching!

I just tried it in PSP; and it works well. Although I am going to try it in Photoshop CS2 as well for comparison purposes. I normally wouldn't do this either; but I know it will get cumbersome with that many textures!

Good topic! I've been finding texture res to cause more memory problems than poly counts since V4E. That's not to say high poly counts don't cause problems, too. Just that, on my system, textures always seemed to be the greater of the memory evils. Thanks for the suggestion of batch reducing. Doing it manually does get time intensive for some Poser stuff. Another texture tip. If your Poser figures won't be close-up, leave out the bump map textures. By doing this, I can nearly double the number of figures in a scene.

"Another texture tip. If your Poser figures won't be close-up, leave out the bump map textures." Yes, very true.

Well, it's onme of reasons I stopped using Vue 5 pro. I got tired of all the mem problems related to poser texture imports. I've switched to Poser 6 now instead of importing Poser figures into Vue and I've got no problems anymore. I handle a lot more poser figures in Poser 6 (with a lot of high res textures) then I was ever able to do in Vue 5 Pro.

If you have P5Pro , you can incorporated texture via Deep acces panel Change shadow to DepthMap , reduce map size until 1/2 or 3/4 your project Try read Deep access & Light Tune PDF for sure Last month this texture problem , give me headache , when making Movie in VuePro . But after read again the module help ,hmmm... its worth it Thanks , i hope this help