Massive Files... Unfortunate Trend G9 Update

[CaptainRon]

With that polygon count, your character better have nose hair!

To be fair, I don't think its just a Daz thing... I think this is just the way of the world these days. Like, what are you really going to get out of an 8k home TV screen? They sell them, and if you can find something to show on them (Daz Genesis 9?), are you even going to be able tell if you aren't standing right next to the screen?

Daz Iray's default settings will turn 8k textures into a collection of JPG artifacts, and I bet most people using Genesis 9 don't even know that. No one will really notice because no one is rendering 8k.

[dave]

In Respone to Frank21 comment
RE: and of course the outfit comes with no less than 63 8k textures = 4.2 Gb (installed) for a simple outfit…. all completely stupid and unnecessay
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My Directory also has 63 textures and if i select all of them they are only 309 mb total
the directory that they installed into is also just 309 mb where in the world did you get 4.2 GB installed?.... the entire uncompressed content folder is 4.31 GB and 3.98GB of that is the geometry.
anyway that outfit on G9 Victoria will overfill my RTX 2080TI memory which is 11GB and kick it to the threadripper CPU That is insane for 1 character and a outfit....that outfit is garbage as far as i am concerned. i could probably fbx all those and fix then in 3ds max but these guys that design this stuff in zbrush - this is what you get....there is a great discussion about this content on the daz3d forums as well

[Frank21]

Sorry @Davev, I saw those stats on a Daz forum thread and assumed they were accurate. I don't have the outfit myself. Obviously the 4.2 GB thing refers to the whole installation and not just the textures. Still.. 4+GB for one outfit seems a tad excessive to me.

[Glassman]

This obsession with texture resolution is bizarre. Obviously more information is always better. Downsampling is trivial, and upsampling (superresolution) is now realistic and easy up to 4x with AI-based techniques (GANs, diffusion). That stuff is pretty user friendly now once one has located the relevant .jpgs or .png, not sure it's worth making a fuss about.

(Of course there is a world in which DAZ would include those tools and enable them on-the-fly before Iray passes textures into GPU VRAM, but one can dream).

[Frank21]

Thanks @Glassman. It isn't really a texture resolution thing though that is part of it. It's efficiency vs practicality and the false notion that bigger somehow equates with better. It could have a cultural aspect to it with US vs European cultural traits.. size versus efficiency.. super-sized meals/cars/houses etc. With respect to the outfit, unless one has a particular need to render extreme close-ups with high settings, 8K serves no practical purpose whatsoever. If fact it represents a hinderance to the vast majority of those who don't. Let's say to your average user who don't have the computing power and make your typical single full-body or multi-character scenes.
How does it affect me? I worked on a render yesterday and spent an inordinate time finding and reducing maps down to a practical size (FG Mystic Alehouse). The flagstone floor textures (albedo, normal, height, roughness) were all a whopping (stupid) 8192 x 8192 px despite the product description saying 4K, with 4K IMO unnecessary in itself. I say stupid because the product is designed to be renderd as a scene and not in close-up. Who the hell needs 8K for a floor FFS. So for me, I consider myself the average user with a mid-range GPU, the texture bloat was a massive time waster and nothing else.

[Glassman]

Thanks for your answer ! I like hi-res woods and marbles 🙂 More seriously, indeed in your case it served no purpose, but I really think this is only an issue because Daz doesn't allow for user-defined prerender texture resizing, something one could implement in 100 lines of (Python) code or less.

I also agree that in many instances the obsession on megapixels is sad opportunistic marketing hype (like a lot of Daz things...) - one would not put 64k textures clothing on a G2F - there is a clear point of diminishing returns, but due to the nature of raytracing, that point sits at a multiple of your screen resolution like @Littlepleasures mentioned, so we could easily see quality gains till 8k or in the limit 16k textures become widespread.

[Frank21]

Thanks for that LP. I did use the texture reducer script to downsize textures for the Inn by 50%, but some of them closer to the camera I had to find and re-apply the full ones, time consuming. It was either reduce them or the scene wouldn't GPU render. I agree that with characters' skin hi-rez textures are desirable. And if I had the money I could get a GPU with more VRAM.
To extend the bigger is better idea then why not 16K or 32K or 64K? and tell those who complain hard cheese.. just get an A100 with 80GB VRAM. Rather an elitist attitude.

[Oldwolf]

I use Gigapixel AI to reduce texture sizes to no larger than 2048 in dimensions. I wish I could recall where I read that you don't need textures higher in resolution than what you render at. I render at 1080p so anything over 1920 is larger than I need unless I am doing a closeup. The same thing happens in Second Life with some vendors selling items where everything is at the max 2k size ... even for a small gem in a ring. SO I have an external hard drive with just a textures folder on it. When I need something I load it and copy over the textures it whines are missing, use gigapixel AI to shrink them down and delete the originals I just copied. If I EVER need ultra high mega ridiculoso sized textures for a closeup, I will replace the maps temporarily by opening surfaces and pointing it to the ultra high mega ridiculoso sized texture on the external. But it's rare I need to do that.

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