does anybody know what the best or "proper"
procedure in carrara is when working with
image maps as shaders?

the situation: i have a butt-load of image map
files in my shaders. (usually a color file for
color and grayscale maps in each of the other
properties - bump, reflection, and so on.)

these are often the same image. when i need
to use the same image repeatedly, would it
be best to create a shader with that map as
the color channel, then reference that shader
for all occurances in my main shader for the
object?

so i guess what i'm asking, is does an image
load into carrara once, or every time a shader
uses it?

i'm trying to find ways of speeding up file
parsing and rendering without sacrificing
quality by reducing resolution or compressing
images further.

i hope i've explained the question clearly enough.

I know this doesn't answer your question but what I've read is that for realism you don't necessarily want to use the same exact map in each channel. Sometimes bump maps are blurred a bit from the original (I think so that the light/dark transitions aren't so drastic) and the reflection map can be hand-tweaked, etc. www.dvgarage.com has a lot to say about texture maps and Digital Texturing and Painting is an interesting read.

I've been working on texturing a model with T-maps lately and got into some problems . The only way i could find to make Carrara update the image files was to close and reopen the file, or make a dozen operations to reload the t-maps for each channel ... Not really productive on this side, if you ask me . A simple 'reload all textures' button would be very welcome !