Cache texture tiles using BOT (block ordered texture)

For Maya software rendering only.

For more information on file textures, see File textures.

When you render, scripts, scenes, textures, and so on, are loaded into RAM. If all available RAM is used, the machine may hang or experience swapping problems. To reduce the load on RAM during render time, you can convert your textures to Block Ordered Textures (BOT), which are essentially tiles. (For more information on tileable images, see File textures). With BOT files, a small cache of texture tiles are kept in RAM; when Maya needs more during render time, it goes to disk to find them.

The BOT cache is a fixed amount of approximately 250KB in RAM and efficiently caches textures.

BOT is not recommended for all texture files, but you notice the difference in speed when rendering high resolution textures.

Use the BOT pre-render setup

A new and optimized scene file is generated and is ready for the renderer when you use the BOT pre-render setup.

For more information, type the following:

maya -optimizeRender -help

maya -optimizeRender [options] mayaFile optimizedMayaFile

where mayaFile is the Maya file to be optimized and optimizedMayaFile is the name of the optimized Maya file.

Use the following options:

-botRes ‘int’	Resolution for which BOT files are produced. If this flag is not used, a default botRes of 512x512 is used.
-botLoca ‘name’	Directory in which BOT files reside (default is in the same directory as the original file).
-help	Prints the help message.
-noBOT	Avoid BOT creations.
-noCleanup	Avoid cleaning up non-rendering related data.