It would be really cool if you could export individual texture tiles and not just the entire tile range . If I am working on just a single tile, I dont need mudbox to write out 40 other image files every time I export. My suggestion would be give us a secondary option to export screen active tiles that would only export the tiles you don’t have locked.

Thanks

Robert Vignone
http://www.robertvignone.com

I’d quite like it to only export the textures that have been touched in a session. Typically I’ll only be working on some of the layers and have to wait AGES for it to save them all every time I Ctrl+S, even if I’ve only worked on one. Then if you’ve just worked on the sculpt it wouldn’t need to re-save every texture file, only the model itself and vice versa so it doesn’t need to save the model if you’ve only worked on the texture.

So I don’t tend to save while working on textures, I’ll just export the layers I’ve changed individually (I need to assemble them in Phtoshop anyway to get the layer blend modes I need). Which takes far less time, even if I went through and manually saved each one and changed all their names. Which suggests there’s some sort of major overhead when saving textues with a mud file.

Which brings me to another point. Only a minor one though. When you export a texture layer the format seems to default to PNG, regardless of what the original format was when it was originally started. Wouldn’t it make more sense to default to what format the texture layer was originally? Then if I’ve set them all up as 8Bit Tifs the exporter would default to the same format.

Yes, all very good ideas, as mud is not very smart when it comes to “saving time” (pun intended). If you were working with tiles, which i am not sure if you are, it would be even worse if it has to export possibly hundreds of maps for each layer, every time you export or save. For me, on my good computer, I never had to much of an issue with muds texture saving style. But now that I am working on a machine that is less fast, working over networks, It is starting to really kill some time for the most simple stuff.

I strongly feel that if a tile is locked, mud should NOT be saving out a possibly large file for that tile every time you export or save a layer by default.

Robert Vignone
http://www.robertvignone.com

No exactly, this is only with one UV tile, so I can’t imagine how slow it would be with dozens.

I tend to use a lot of layers. But since they’re being put together in Photoshop and I’m only really painting one at a time to make the most of the ability in Mud to paint over seams and use projection I guess I should just delete the layers I’m done with.

But I do still think it seems as though Mud is very slow and inefficient in its texture saving process. Actually it’s pretty slow saving models too. I’m sure some improvement could be made here. Time saved is money saved and all that. :)

Out of curiosity,what is your single texture size that your generally working with?

Robert Vignone
http://www.robertvignone.com

For this example (and most of the others) I’m using 2048x2048 maps. Not especially large.

In this case there’s 12 diffuse layers of varying complexity (but mostly fairly well covered), two spec layers and two normal map bump maps. Both of these two only have one actual layer and the blank layer you have to make before you can import a map. I know I don’t need those any more, I just never bothered to delete them. It comes to about 160 meg for the lot.

The model is 7000 ish polys as I’m painting on a game-res model directly, no sculpting at all.

It takes 1 minute and 10 seconds to save those maps, even if I’ve not touched any of them.

Photoshop saves the combined diffuse texture with all layers intact (about 30-40 since many were made in Photoshop, only a few in Mudbox) in 3 seconds. I know there’s going to be an overhead for saving seperate files but that sounds a bit much.

Incidentally, Mudbox doesn’t save the Bump As Normal Map option or any of its settings so every time I load the file I have to set the material back to bump as normal on, then change it to Max format.