Surfaces with .tiff images of hundreds of MB

ariakas8

First of all, this is my first post: Welcome everyone. I am not English native so please be patient with me :)

I am a totally noob in Daz3D, I started just a month ago, and I’ve been messing with it but there’s still a long road for me. This is my first time with a 3D tool and I have a huge lack of knowledge and I get lost a lot of times. I am using a lot my intuition to solve and comprehend how things work, (I also use help of tutorials and some friends).

The thing is that I have been editing a lot of surfaces in Daz3D. I am applying Iray Uber to all the textures and also using Iray shaders (friend recommendation), but I still fight to understand what all the parameters do to the surface. I try very hard, but some of them still resist me.

But from what I understood, when you have to define how the “displacement strength” or the “Glossy Roughness” will affect to your surface, you can use an image with black and white tones. The white zones will be the ones where the values of these parameters will be applied, and the black zones will be ignored.

Usually, I found that the images used in surfaces are in .jpg format, which their size may be from few KB to several MB. But I´ve seen other creators that, instead of .jpg, for these kind of parameters (displacement strenght), they use .tiff (example: the last time I have seen a .tiff image in the Displacement Strenght was on “Pix-Synx for G3F”).

I tried to open one of those 4K .tiff image of 96MB that it was being used as a “Displacement Strength (Map)” and saved it as a .jpg format (same resolution) and also as a .png (png-24) and in both cases the size was just 130KB. And after that, I went back on Daz3D and used the .jpg instead of the .tiff, and the result (in my humble experience) was the same.

So, the question is: Why some people are using .tiffs when they are so heavy when they could use .jpg or even .png to achieve the same? What am I missing here? What do you think is the best image format in these situations?

Richard Haseltine

The tiff files use 16bit for each value (usually they are greyscale, so that would be 16 bits per pixel, but a colour image would be 48 bits per pixel). A standard texture imaeg uses 8 bits per channel, so that's half the size. The higher bit depth is sued for displacement because, with a high range between the minimum and maximum displacement, the 256 steps allowed by 8 bits per channel are not enough to produce a smooth effect.

nicstt

I actually like products to include .png and .tiffs; they hold a lot more data, so are great for editing. .jpg degrade quite quickly if you load and save the image a number of times. If I need to I can covert images to .jpg and save space. There is nothing I can do with a jpg to make it better.

... And the larger the image you're going to render, the more likely you will notice differences.