Graphics optimization...

chaley

Right now, I'm using a 3d application to generate a 2400X320 image that I've been cutting into sections that are 480X320 and lining them up horizontally. I planned to do this again for a different section of my "endless runner" game, but it seems as though the RAM usage is pretty intense.

Any tips on a better way to "cut up" or optimize images?

JohnPapiomitis

what are you using to render?

chaley

Mental Ray within Maya.

JohnPapiomitis

The first 2 things that come to my mind are this. In your render setting for mental ray, go into the quality tab and see how low you can set your quality preset without sacrificing too much quality. Im sure having your quality preset on production will give you a much more heavy render then say having it set on draft.

Another thing you could try is instead of rendering out as a straight .png render out at a smaller file format such as jpeg then go into photoshop and resave as a .png and see if that makes a differece.

Not sure if thatll help, its worth a try though.

chaley

My current workflow is to render a "tiff" and bring it into Photoshop. I use the "posterize" adjustment to a point where I can see there is a loss, but not to the point where it's visually offensive. I'll then use the "Save For Web And Devices" feature to save out the 24 bit png.

The only problem with changing the Mental Ray settings is that anti-aliasing is one of the "losses" and I can't sacrifice that. My "low end" standard is to set the sampling to "min-0 and max-2" which is fine for most instances. Jagged edges are a "pet-peeve" of mine.

natzuur

I think a base size of 2304x320 would be better, then you can cut the image into 4, 512x320 images, then cut those into 4, 512x256 and 4, 512x64 images. When using 480x320 is actually considering it 512x512. 512x512= 262144, where as 512x256+512x64= 163840 and it's the same space. Then after having those cuts your left over with a 256x320 area which can be cut into 256x256 and 256x64 which again will be less than the fifth image in your original cut which is considered 512x512. ( something like 85k vs 262k)

Man, even looking at that after writing confuses the eff out of me. But this way if you understand what I'm getting at should be 40%+ more efficient.

old_kipper

I'd do a test on a single section at screen width and would try squashing the 320 high image with a resize in Photoshop to 256, and then sizing the actor/s back up to 320. It might well look ok and radically drop the memory usage. I've done this as a method to put some animated cut scenes in a test and actually resized the 320x480 movie to frames of 256x256, which I zoomed back up to 320x480 as an actor, and the results were not bad.

chaley

Thanks guys... This info is really helpful.