Hi,

I am working on a scene with about 120 meshes and 70 2K texture layers (as of now). All texture layers are TIFFs and the total texture size is about 168 MB. However, I kept getting the GPU memory warning while loading about just half of all textures in the scene. The GPU memory consumption would go up to about 1.8 GB while my GTX 480 only has 1.5 GB of RAM. The FPS is still good at 40 FPS, but the mesh will turn blue at some point and quite letting me texture the mesh.

I am wondering how come a size of total textures of less than 200 MB would take close to 2 GB of GPU memory to work in Mudbox and if there is any tip to work around this performance hit?

Thanks,
Jason

dont load all objects and textures into one scene…
its impossible to load a hole production scene…

work asset per asset…

and dont forget about the up arrow key to unload textures from gpu ram…

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/christoph-schaedl/6/558/73b

The file size might be less than 200meg, but they’ll be stored uncompressed in GPU memory. A single 2048x2048 texture is 16meg (12 meg for RGB plus another 4 for alpha for the layer opacity).

Multiply that by 70 and you get 1120meg. And remember the meshes also live in GPU memory. I can see a scene like that filling up 1.5 gig of GPU space quite quickly.

Thanks oglu and robinball for the inputs. I tried to bring all objects into the scene because they are of one character and I want to paint textures for certain parts while referring to how other parts look like to keep consistency.

The “Up” arrow key tip is really helpful. I thought turning off display of all paint layers would totally free up memory for an object, but the Up arrow key free up even more. For now, I will only keep paint layers of certain objects and only display these objects to keep the interactivity up.

Also, will reduce the number of objects help on saving GPU memory? For example, I can combine some objects in Maya first before exporting them as an OBJ so that the Mudbox scene will look the same but just have say 20 objects instead of like 120 objects.

I doubt it’ll make that much difference. There wull be some overhead for multiple objects, but raw geometry and textures probably fill memory much quicker.

Are they low res objects or high res sculpted ones? If they’re sculpted high res models I’d suggest deleting the top level or two as a better method of saving memory while painting textures. That will be especially helpful if they’re only for reference.

You can also save GPU memory by collapsing the texture layers and making lower res proxy textures if they’re only for reference.