.dds and you (maya)
So we are using .dds as our texture format…
On the good side there are decent Photoshop tools for using it. It can auto-generate Mips. It compresses reasonably well. The 360 can read them easily. They load in Maya.
On the baaaaad side. It is a lossy format so you have to store uncompressed source. (.psd for us). If you keep editing the files and saving them they will get horrible artifacts. Yes Maya does load them but… Menstrual Ray Renderer does not like them at all. In fact if you even have them in your scene it shits out. Why does that matter you say? Well when you are using Menstrual Ray as your light-mapper its a problem. The easy thing to do is just delete all and assign the default Lambert to all your geo. The issue with that is that if you are doing any global illumination or any light model that uses color transmission you no longer have the texture colors to transmit. Boooooooooooooo.
I recently aquired 2400 separate .dds files for the texture map of the earth. very very high quality images of the earth, clouds and displace/bump. I opened a fully composited file in PS and it is 43k wide. VERY COOL… but, as I feared… not workable within maya… crash crash crash…. so, I was hoping there was some way to import the files as a series of tiles to map on a sphere. So the renderer can read what it needs and toss what it dont.
I dont work with games or files for games within maya at all. I just animate for DVD and Film… I do understand there may be a way in gaming use to have large images like what I am using to be used in such a way as tiling. Can you help me understand how to use these files in Maya? I would really appreciate it. If you email me I would gladly give you my cell # if you are interested in giving me a call.
Thank you for your time
Dan.
@Dan Clancy: Have you tried using a layered shader where each layer is one piece? Also maybe try messing with MipMaps to change the texture rez based on how close you are.
@Ryan: Have you tried using maya’s built in mental ray image converter to convert the .dds files to .maps for lightmap generation? it’d be a bit messy, but if you make a script to run right before baking lighting that swaps out the textures with .map equivalents, it should run decently well in MR.