I have been reading this thread http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2721601

With interest over in the Poser forum and I was wondering how this applies to Cararra's render engine and how it manages textures.

Do any of the Carrara Guru's here know what is the best resolution to lower textures to verses most efficient use of memory etc,

Cheers,

Nick.

Carrara 6 has a better way to handle textures. In the preferences Imaging, Scratch Disk.
Its a little confuse to use: you need to set the limit of physical memory will be used until Carrara use yuor HD as a virtual memory.
The better way is to use 10% of the value of yuor total memory:

If you have 1GB use 100Mb

Dont use low values like 10Mb because Carrara will use only 10 mb of your RAM to textures and you will end avery slow machine.

This subject is true for all 3D apps with render engines or stand-alone render engines like Maxwell.

The 3d term for having different texture maps based on distance from the render camera is called mip-mapping - it's really heavily used by 3d game render engines as well.

As GK notes above, Carrara does use a spooler scheme to manage textures but different resolutions is faster at render time in my experience.

On still, screen resolution imagery there is not going to be a big difference in time or quality unless you bring the camera right up to the object with the texture map. However, for print/lithographic quality still images, there will be a significant change in render time based upon map resolution.

Even greater still will be the difference during an animation render. In fact, in can make a difference of days during the final output.

Carrara doesn't have a mip-mapping capability built into it but you can manually manage texture maps to accomplish it. There is a free shader plug-in that accomplishes mip-mapping and it can be found here.

Using the scratch disk will effectively allow more stuff to load up in virtual memory, but will still slow down the workflow and the rendering (hard drive is much slower than live RAM), sometimes dramatically. I use the DownRezer utility to allow more characters, clothings, scene items, while keeping memory usage low. Look for it in the renderosity store, it works great.