Image Clip Memory Management

mental ray

You can define how much image clip information Softimage passes to the mental ray renderer and how much of that information mental ray, in turn, sends to the render slaves in your distributed rendering network. This is useful when you are working with large texture images because you can speed up rendering by reducing the amount of information being sent across the network.

You can set each image clip to one of these three image management modes:

• Load in Memory: Softimage opens the image file and keeps in memory any changes or clip effects that you apply to it. At render time, the image's pixel data, including effects, is sent to mental ray. If you are using distributed rendering, the pixel data is sent from the master to all render slaves.

  • This is the only image management mode that lets you use the clip effects available from the Texturing tab of the image clip property editor.

  • If you are creating an MI file, it will have the texture in-line.

    NoteIf you're working with large image clips (1000 pixels or more in either direction), Load in Memory mode can decrease rendering performance. Because Softimage loads the image pixel data before passing it to mental ray, two copies of the image are created, doubling the memory requirement. If this is an issue, set the image management mode to Use From Disk or Broadcast.

• Use from disk: Softimage passes the image clip's path and file name directly to mental ray. mental ray opens the file and, if you are using distributed rendering, sends the image's pixel data to the render slaves. Unless you specify otherwise, this is the default image management mode for all new image clips.

  • You cannot apply any clip effects because the Softimage doesn't load the image in memory.

  • If you are creating an MI file, it will have the texture in-line as long as the echo verbatim option is on. If echo verbatim is off, the MI file will have the path reference to the texture.

• Broadcast: Softimage passes the image clip's path and file name directly to mental ray, which then opens the texture file and broadcasts the path and filename to the render slaves, instead of sending the image's pixel data.

  • You cannot apply any clip effects because the Softimage doesn't load the image in memory.

  • If you are creating an MI file, it will have the texture in-line as long as the echo verbatim option is on. If echo verbatim is off, the MI file will have the path reference to the texture.

    NoteIf you set the image management mode to either Use from Disk or Broadcast, your texture image must be in a format supported by both mental ray and Softimage. This is because Softimage passes the image's path and file name to mental ray without opening the image. File formats supported by both Softimage and mental ray include: .pic / .tga / .tiff / .sgi / .jpg / .ct / .map.

SetValue "Clips.*.ImageDefinitionType", <mode>

Hardware (Realtime Shaders Display Modes)

When 3D views are set to OpenGL or DirectX display modes, only one copy of a texture is uploaded to the graphics processor even if multiple clips are defined from the same source. This optimizes the use of texture memory.