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While I share your preference for larger textures, I also recognize that it's a privileged position to hold. Download speeds and bandwidth caps may not be a problem for you or me, but not everybody is so lucky.
8k MR is smart because it gives you wiggle room to edit and tweak before coming up with a regular 4k texture.
All other sites require (force) you to manually download files; DAZ3D provides multiple options to do this, so having file sizes listed isn't an absolute requirement.
I consider making 3D art itself to be quite a privilege. This is a hobby/job that is not for the faint of heart. It requires a vast investment of time, money, and skill to take part in. The size of a download is just one of those things. The Daz store must sell quality assets. It is no different if somebody only has an old laptop CPU to render on. That people have weak hardware shouldn't bring down the quality of the assets sold to everyone else. It no doubt sucks to be such a situation, and I know what that is like to only have a 2GB GPU for rendering, and not be able to buy a better one. Even back then I still felt the same way about the assets. I used Windows Power Tools (ancient today) to quickly downsize entire folders in a snap with smaller textures. I still couldn't render much.
- An 8k texture will always use 4x more Ram or Vram than a 4k texture.
- 1 4k texture will consume as much Ram or Vram as a half million polygons (ballpark number, give or take).
It's literally better to spend a million polygons to model out a detail, than to have it on a 8k diffuse and normalmap.
- You only exploit the full resolution of a texture if you're rendering/viewing the texture at a 1:1 pixel ratio, meaning that if the texture of an Iris is 4k, you would have to render the Iris alone at 4k and view it at a screen resolution of 4k pixels. Anything below that and you're losing detail.
You don't notice the loss in your typical renders because most textures have no reason to exist at 4k and all their detail can be perfectly preserved at at least half the size, often less, if we're talking Daz products.
Textures in general always have the largest hit on RAM / VRAM.
While a set of clothing using 8K textures may not seem like an issue (aside from unnecessarily longer loading and processing times), it becomes an issue when you're trying to render more than that set of clothing.
Unoptimized textures take away resources from everything else. People that don't know what to look for, won't understand why they can render the set of clothing by itself, but the Iray render will fall back to CPU if they add anything else.
When I was still on a 8GB VRAM I would often run into the issue that I could either render my environments with 3-4 different and decently optimized characters and clothing sets, or with just 1 unoptimized set using the default G8/3 characters. I had to go in by hand and scale down 4k belt textures (and everything else) that were 90% empty, with the belt part just a solid color anyway.
Then of course, you have people that buy your painfully optimized products with dozens of props, where you fought for every pixel of resolution, and complain that they can only place 1 character in there before IRAY falls back to CPU. The issue then logically has to stem from your large product... it has lots of stuff in it afterall.
First thing you do of course is take a look at what clothes etc they're trying to load, only to realize that it uses as much texture memory as half of your product, usually for something with no detail at all, or with textures that are always +60% empty. Scaling those textures down then lets you render whatever you want without any loss in the final render quality.
So, in short...
8K, or any hires textures with no detail or detail that could be represented just fine at less resolution are fine if you don't care about the people using them, but they do a disservice to Daz and every other vendor as it makes creating scenes combining different products difficult for people with limited VRAM, and the performace hit of large (wasted) textures makes DAZ Studio feel slower and sluggish in general.
Sorry if it sounds a bit like a rant :/
Good rant /nod
I am people, and I'm ok with 8k textures; I'd sooner have 4k non-jpg textures and again preferably .tiff. But a decent 8k texture is welcome.
8k textures saved with high jpg compression is pointless though.
Just as Strangefate wrote, it is not just about the pixel size of the textures and maps, but also about how much of the area is actually used for anything.
The worst I have come across so far, included the texture and 4 different maps, all 8k at 192MB memory usage per image file, and the area used in the files would have used just 20MB's combined for exactly the same level of detail if the UV-mapping had been done better.
Previously did made some measurements with G8F and 4096x4096px textures (1 inch is 25.4 millimeters / 1 millimeter is 0.0394 inches)
Torso, distance between points; 1481mm - 912.7mm = 568mm (2160px)
Torso at 4096x4096px = 0.26mm/px => 3.8px/mm
Head, distance between points; 1699 - 1576 = 123mm (1453px)
Head at 4096x4096px = 0.08mm/px => 11.8px/mm
8K textures would double the amount of pixels per millimeter, so 7.6px/mm (58px/mm^2) for the torso and 23.6px/mm (557px/mm^2) for the head - Someone doing dermatological studies with DS?
What you are referring to is called texel density as well as UV Intersections. If the UV Map is botched in any way (skewed, weird proportions, not using the whole UV Isle to a high margin) then your texture maps res won't matter - it will always look off. There's also nothing of value to scale your textures up to 8k if you do not render in extreme resolution sizes - and those sizes are rarely used for normal stuff anyways. What matters way more is that 4k - or even 2k - are properly made and correctly encoded. TIFF is a very old format that supports some things that are rarely needed for rendering in that capacity (i.e. it can save alpha maps or layer embedding).
For example if you want to have proper displacement maps - you need 32 Bit depth, however TIFF files only work on 8 or 16 Bit inside DAZ. So if you need a greyscale height/detail map you're better off using .exr's which work wonderfully with all the necessary encoding and bit depth that you'll ever need.
Thanks, I tried them but unfortunatelly they are not of very good quality. Can you recalll another product with 8k txtures?
Thank you