Hi all.

I have a question that I had since long time and now cgfx has been update in Maya I really would like to know how Maya work with .dds files in general and in cgfx case.

I’ve search for long time how optimize textures in the Maya viewport.

Of course giving a jpeg of 4096 or a bmp of 4096 is the same for the GPU memory as Maya decompress the whole texture and put it uncompressed in the GPU memory.

But in the case of .dds? Did Maya put the .dds data without decompress it?

I don’t feel it…

And in the case of cgfx shaders? Did Maya (which maybe use cgfx to handle .dds) put the .dds data without decompress it?

I had ask many video game cgfx shadr writer working on Maya but no one could have told me how maya handle .dds textures.

If there is someone from Autodesk or having enough informations about this which could answer, this could really help me.

Actually, I would like to do nice viewport shading for playblast validation with directors and nice texture (not 256x256...) is important for this. :)

If someone which know even a little piece of answer, thank in advance! :)

Up? :( None have an idea?

The size used in gpu memory will be the size of your dds file, it will not be uncompressed by maya as it won’t be maya rendering the texture but your actual cgfx code that will render it instead.

However, Maya will probably allocate some extra memory for thumbnails for hypershade.

Thank a lot for this answer!

So dds textures used by “CGFX for Maya” will not get pixel informations from Maya viewport memory (except hypershade of course) but directly from the dds (has it should be)

This is a very usefull information! Thanks! :)

This is a video I’ve made with Maya viewport showing four 8k map wit dds using CGFX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVghteicCGM

I was not sur this was using dds compression in it… Thank a lot! :)

Yes, my video use BC1 format (DXT1) but without cgfx shaders.

There is the latest video I made with BC3 (DXT5) compression but dds files are bigger with this options:

http://vimeo.com/28788662

Nine 8k maps in the viewport!

I will maybe try again with BC1 which is almost 50% lighter (and maybe had 18 8k dds textures in my viewport, This could be amazing! o_O)

And there it is:

http://vimeo.com/29346955

Eighteen 8k dds maps using cgfx in Maya 2012.

Hope you like. :)