16-bit Textures

[guenther Malek]

I just bought hires textures, that came as *jpg and 16-bit-*.tif.

Why would i need 16-bit tiffs (for albedo, AO, normal, bump, displacment,....)

unless it´s an HDRI environment?

 

One set of 16-bit tiffs is 2,5 GB!

Do i need that?

Edited October 27, 2018 by guenthermalek

[Ernest Burden III]

Why would i need 16-bit tiffs (for albedo, AO, normal, bump, displacment,....)

 

Sometimes you could be fine with just a jpeg, which is 8bit. If the image is for color, 8bits gives you a lot of range. But for a map that will be evaluated per channel, like normal, an 8bit image only has 256 steps from zero - 100. 16bit is 65k steps - much smoother. For bump, which is evaluating a single channel, you NEED 16bits, though re-save as a grayscale to lower your RAM overhead. Displacement can use either a one channel gray map or a three channel map, usually as a choice when you create your material. Normal maps are CMY and there is type of displacement map that is RGB. In all cases you will get much better results with a 16bit input file.

 

If you are concerned about the file sizes, look at how big the map is vs. your image render size. You may find you can scale down the resolution of some maps--for example if they will be for a chair which will never be more than 1/4 of your final image, so doesn't need 4k maps.

[Chris MacDonald]

Ernest pretty much covered it. The chances of needing that much colour info on diffuse/specular/glossiness/etc are pretty negligible, but you will definitely notice it on a pronounced bump/displacement because (again as has been said) there are only 256 levels of discreet information that can be encoded in single channel 8 bit; which can be very visible.

[Ernest Burden III]

Ernest pretty much covered it...

 

And what I missed Chris picked up. Teamwork!