I am a bit frustrated at the size of these textures in 16bit tiff. 40-50 megs for a 3k leaf texture, x4 for the normal, roughness, translucency maps etc.
So if im rendering a leaf or anything else in a blender scene, will notice the difference if the textures were 8bit tiff instead?
Or when blender throws all the light around in the scene and i save final render as a 16bit tiff will that be fine even if the textures were 8bit?
You can use 8bit in most cases.
A 3K texture for a leaf texture is total overkill. Are you using such a high resolution texture for a single leaf? Just don’t. 2K is enough for most textures, if its just a single leaf you can go even lower.
You might want to use 16bit when dealing with displacement maps and maybe normal maps to avoid banding artifacts. If your 8bit textures look ok and don’t have any artifacts, there is no reason to use 16bit.
For roughness, alpha and translucency you use greyscale images to further decrease the size of the file.
For the final render i would suggest to use 16bit because you can always downgrade your texture afterwards.
Ok thanks. I shall downscale it to 2K. an 8bit for the main texture. seems crazy that textures dot com is selling tiny plant leaf textures at upto 8192x8192 and charging 60 premium credits for each map. Costs about 80 euros to buy a scanned rock at high res with all its textures. a scene with say 1000 scanned assets would cost 80,000 euro. But im ranting.