Figures sharing textures/skin shaders

fred9803

For reasons I won't go into, I often have multiple characters set up with identical skin textures in scenes. I was wondering if there is a benefit with regard to overall texture load on GPU VRAM in doing this. It's not the reason I do it, I just like my people to have not too different skins.

I know each figure will need to have their texture maps loaded, but if they are exactly the same, do the textures only need to be loaded once to memory, like with instancing.

Richard Haseltine

The maps are loaded only once and then DS links the surface property to the texture, so yiou are saving memory by reusing the maps.

fred9803

Thanks Richard

This probably explains why I can fit more characters into a scene than I should be able to do with 8GB VRAM.