JoePublic posted at 2:51AM Sun, 13 September 2020 - #4399196

In my 20yrs of Posering on low-end hardware, I think the biggest "resource hogs" are high res textures.Think about it: Unless you render your figure at super-high-end resolution at an insanely huge size, 90% of those 4K x 4K textures are just wasted, because the render engine just blurrs it all out.

So while I keep a copy of the original textures, of course, my "working textures" are 1200 x 1200 at most. Sometimes even less.

I've spent a lot of time trying to make Poser faster, and I found that, at least for my setup, textures were the second most likely cause for slowdowns (with lots of morphs + conforming apparel being the first). So I definitely agree with you there. I've gone through quite a few material setups and removed spec, bump, displacement, and/or normal maps to cut down on the amount of memory used by those images, replacing them with procedural alternatives. But I aim for a slightly stylized look in my renders, not for photorealism, and the procedural alternatives work well for that. They may not work as well, particularly for skin, for those whose goal is photorealistic close-up portraits.

Where I disagree is that 4k diffuse textures are wasted. For one thing, Firefly won't blur them out if (a) you turn off image filtering on all image maps (except for hair, which looks better with Quality filtering); and (b) you set the Post Filter Type to sinc and Post Filter Size to 2 or 3 in your Firefly render settings. Also, with computer monitors getting increasingly high-res, final renders should be larger (~3k or higher) or else they'll seem tiny and blurry in just a few years. I regularly do final renders at 4400 × 2475 pixels b/c I like to be able to see all the details and b/c it no longer takes ages to render that large. (My average for final renders is around 15 minutes for direct light.)

I actually wish more prop sets had higher res diffuse textures, so that they'd be useable for the foreseeable future without my needing to create new textures for them. I have quite a few older sets that I can no longer use in a "regular" render (i.e., one I don't intend to apply an art effect to) b/c the textures just aren't high enough quality, particularly compared to the textures on characters' skin and apparel. That doesn't apply to prop sets that make use of tiling textures, as those can easily be updated, but I have some that make use of painted-on detailing or other custom elements that I can't easily re-make in a higher res version. I've even tried out some apps that specialize in up-sizing photos w/o minimal loss of quality specifically so that I could up-size some of those textures!!

But I have also, in a few cases, made lower-res versions of textures just as you describe (while keeping the originals), and that's also a good thing to know how to do :-)

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles