Him   O just got a new quad core machine so the 3delight renderer now is available. When I use it I get a message that studio is doing something to the image textures which takes a few minutes. Is there any setting to avoid that step ?

thanks

3Delight uses tdlmake to optimize images (i.e., creating *.tdl file in temp folder).  The process starts as soon as scene is loaded.  If you wait until is is finished you won't get that message.  The files are cached while the scene is loaded and no further optimization is needed unless a texture is changed.

I understand that to be the 'mipmaping' step.

It also gets triggered when you switch Gamma Correction off or back on.
That suggests there's also some filtering going on.

The process is multithreaded and quite quick for me, are you loading particularly complex scenes?

The scene says optimising 4/82 files or similar. I would not have thought there were that many images involved but I can get a list and check. The renders are so much faster than my old system that it doesnt matter , its just the first time I have watched 3delight run.

This is what I mean. Its not a problem but did add 5 minutes to the render.

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You should check your system configuration to make sure you are using all your cores.

Also, you need to have multi-threading set in DS for best performance

Yes that is completely normal and nothing to be alarmed about... as was posted by Medzinatar, It's just 3Delight running tdlmake to optimize the textures, bumpmaps and etc as part of the normal process of rendering...

When it shows a large number if images to optimize you have to keep in mind that each prop, figure, or character you load into a scene may have one texture or many and the more complex the item the more likely it will have a number of maps assigned to it (for example a vicky figure might have maps for head, body/limbs, eyes, corneas, brows, lashes, etc... plus bump maps and trans-maps as well for every copy of that figure you use... and then there are the maps for her hair, clothes items and etc) rather than a single image map.

If you had 20 items in the scene each using 5 textures then you would potentially have 100 image maps that tdlmake has to process. Tdlmake has to optimize each of these to prep the render which is what leads to that message...

I often do test renders as I work on setting up a new scene, so that I can make sure that things are coming together the way I want them to, and will frequently get this message pop-up when the render starts...