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8k texture PBR painting


JoseConseco
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Hi  I have a job that would require 8k textures. But Filling 8x texture with pbr material took 15 minutes. It is unworkable. I have question: is there a way to speed it up or this is how 3dc works on 8k pbr textures?

I have 8gb of ram and it is all taken by 3d coat, so maybe buying another 8GB would speed things up? Or mabye CPU is limiting factor (I'm not planning on buying another CPU for sure -  I have i5 4670k). In that case maybe Mari is the way to go...

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I don't consider this SOS. This feature is barely out of beta. Do not use this feature in production, it is not ready for it. If you're finding it to be unoptimized, please file a Mantis report, file a report on the beta thread or email Andrew with your findings so he can optimize it.

 

 

The other aspect, you need to post more information too. Trying to find a solution with this kind of general knowledge makes it impossible to help you.

  • What kind of model are you painting
  • Your full system specs please
  • Your computers OS
  • How many layers are in the PBR material you're using
  • What channels are you painting with (color, gloss, etc.)
  • What conditions are the material using
  • If there are any conditions, have you pre-calculated the AO map or not

 

 

Please let us know more to help you, any relevant information will go a long way in finding what is causing the slow down you're having and if there is a bug or general slowness, solve it or optimize it.

 

 

PS - I'm moving this to the general support area since this is a beta feature and not a production ready feature.

 

PPS - I have an older machine than your's, and it works faster with some materials, others not. There are a lot of factors here at play than just "fast or slow".

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Thx Javis. I haven't taken the job yet, that it why I was testing PBR to see if it will work for 8k textures with uv mesh.  My specs are 8gb ram, i5 4670k 4cores. 3.4ghz.  Baking AO took for 8k map took around 25minutes, cavity took around 5 minutes. 

I have no experience with ptex, but it seems to work way faster. Filling layer with PBR material that consists of 4 layers (2masked by cavity, one by AO) took less than one minute. But now when I try to repeat ptex process,  AO bake in Ptex is black. 

Anyway there is huge difference in speed of UV mesh vs Ptex, in advantage of Ptex. I guess I will skip the job this time.

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Hey Jose, how much VRAM does your video card have? That's also a factor when dealing with such huge textures, like 8k and many paint room layers.
I have an old character whose main body uses an 8k tex and I once had a problem loading the textured 3b file on a 32GB machine with a 3GB card.

Also, have you asked the client if lower-res UDIM tiles are an option? You'll always get better results (=lower texel loss due to empty space) when dealing with lower texture res, The only downside is that it's harder to work with multiple textures.

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I have 660GT, 2gb ram. But  I suppose If I ran out of Vram, 3dc would crash. It should not affect performance imo. On the other hand, If I ran of system RAM then 3dc would use hdd as swap, and that could lead to slow performance... UDIM, I'm not familiar with those...

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UDIM, I'm not familiar with those...

UDIM is nothing more than a successful and renowned attempt of introducing a naming convention of UV-tiles (instead of names like "mymodel_color_u1_v_2.png", etc.) for easier use between the programs and easier parsing of file names.

Instead of using a single 8k texture, which take ages to process even in Photoshop, you could use sixteen 2k textures. Identical memory usage, but 16x lower texel loss and possible performance gain (depending on application) because there's a high probability that most of the time you will paint over only one tile (in an optimistic case) and only this tile needs to be processed instead of a full 8k one. Taking a lower texel loss into account, you could also probably get away with fewer tiles, so instead of 536MB you could end up with, say, ten 8-bit RGBA textures which take 335,544,320 bytes of memory. Without any quality loss, if you're careful.

 

PS. For more info about UDIM naming and layout convention, check this out: http://bneall.blogspot.ca/p/udim-guide.html

Edited by ajz3d
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for 8k painting you need more that 2GB GPU VRam

Well that's not entirely true, although the performance on video cards that have little memory might suffer. The character I mentioned that I was working with, I started texturing it on a 8GB RAM machine with GF9800GTX, which if I remember correctly had only 512MB of VRAM. :rofl: The character had 1x8k, 2x4k and some 2k maps IIRC. And I generated LOTS of layers for each material.

It's strange that I had problems opening the file on a 32GB RAM/3GB VRAM system. Maybe it's because I only use 1GB of virtual memory? Or maybe it's because Kepler cards are nerfed (I'm currently using a GTX660Ti)? This I don't know. But immediately after I managed to load the file, I reduced all textures by half.

 

Thx guys. I skipped the job this time. But maybe next time I will use udim.

I hope you didn't skip the job because of our apocalyptical posts? :(

 

PS. You can monitor VRAM usage with a hardware monitoring software, like OpenHardwareMonitor, MSI something (I forgot its name), etc.

Edited by ajz3d
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Thx Javis. I haven't taken the job yet, that it why I was testing PBR to see if it will work for 8k textures with uv mesh.  My specs are 8gb ram, i5 4670k 4cores. 3.4ghz.  Baking AO took for 8k map took around 25minutes, cavity took around 5 minutes. 

I have no experience with ptex, but it seems to work way faster. Filling layer with PBR material that consists of 4 layers (2masked by cavity, one by AO) took less than one minute. But now when I try to repeat ptex process,  AO bake in Ptex is black. 

Anyway there is huge difference in speed of UV mesh vs Ptex, in advantage of Ptex. I guess I will skip the job this time.

 

Ok, wew. I'm glad to hear. Also sorry to hear you did have to turn it down, too. That sucks!

 

It sounds like your video card might be the culprit here, but it's hard to say.

Do you have DDR2 or DDR3 for your system memory?

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Well that's not entirely true, although the performance on video cards that have little memory might suffer. The character I mentioned that I was working with, I started texturing it on a 8GB RAM machine with GF9800GTX, which if I remember correctly had only 512MB of VRAM. :rofl: The character had 1x8k, 2x4k and some 2k maps IIRC. And I generated LOTS of layers for each material.

It's strange that I had problems opening the file on a 32GB RAM/3GB VRAM system. Maybe it's because I only use 1GB of virtual memory? Or maybe it's because Kepler cards are nerfed (I'm currently using a GTX660Ti)? This I don't know. But immediately after I managed to load the file, I reduced all textures by half.

 

I hope you didn't skip the job because of our apocalyptical posts? :(

 

PS. You can monitor VRAM usage with a hardware monitoring software, like OpenHardwareMonitor, MSI something (I forgot it's name), etc.

 

I hear you, but I think it's really important to mention that 3DC has upped the amount of channels it has per layer per scene. It really ups the amount of RAM you need now, compared to how it was before. So while it might still perform A-OK on some older machines with scenes that are lighter (not many layers or channels in use), with those heavier scenes, it'll definitely start to crap out. At least for now. I'm sure Andrew will be optimizing this new system as time goes.

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I hear you, but I think it's really important to mention that 3DC has upped the amount of channels it has per layer per scene. It really ups the amount of RAM you need now, compared to how it was before. So while it might still perform A-OK on some older machines with scenes that are lighter (not many layers or channels in use), with those heavier scenes, it'll definitely start to crap out. At least for now. I'm sure Andrew will be optimizing this new system as time goes.

Ah, right. I completely forgot about this!

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ajz3d - I skipped job because I it was unworkable. Filling 8k layer with PBR materail took 15 min, on uv mesh. On  Ptex it took less than 1 minute, but Ptex had problem with AO baking. It was all black.

Javis - I have 8gb  ddr3 ram. I chected 3dc ram usage, and  it was below 8gb. I didn't check vram.

I actually wonder what hapens when computer is out of Vram? Shouldn't just 3dc crash? Or Vram is swapped with ram or maybe hdd? To my understanding Vram, ram is responsible for how big images I can load do project, but performance should be ony CPU, GPU dependant, right? Yep I know speed of ram is important, but it is just for speed of loading, saving data, and it shouldn't be responsible for speed of processing...

And one more thing, why ptex is so much faster? Hardware is the same, yet Ptex performs much better.

Thx guys for your time.

Edited by JoseConseco
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One thing I do know is if your system is getting close to hitting your RAM limit, it will bog down and take excessively long calculation times, because your OS is moving a lot of that RAM to your Pagefile and waiting until it's cleared the necessary space. RAM is cheap, so if you have the capacity to bump it up to 16 or 32GB, you definitely want to give yourself the extra headroom

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And if you also run out of pagefile, all processes will begin to malfunction, freeze, crash, and ultimately it will probably end up with a BSOD.

But generally speaking, the result would be unpredictable.

Edited by ajz3d
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For me painting in 2048*2048 is too slow, not a possible workflow,the cursor is lagging a lot ,sometimes i must wait,  while it is very smooth and fast as if i was using a normal painting sofwtare whe ni use Substance Painter.

3D Coat would need some speed up in the painting room.

Edited by Ratchet
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