I am trying to texture a character model for cycles renders, and wanted to better understand UDIM tiling. Specifically, the performance.
I’ve been looking at gun assets for ideas (e.g. this) and in some cases these use hundreds of UDIMs. The last time I used UDIMs in blender, the material used ten 4K tiles and the performance was abysmal.
But these reference models don’t look like they are using a bunch of 512x512 textures (or a single 4K tile, etc.) - the details are so crisp. Even if they are mostly 1K and 2K tiles, it seems like Blender would struggle with this (?).
I’m wondering if it would be better to split (effectively) each UV island into a separate tile that are smaller. But it’s a lot of work just to find out Blender can’t handle it anyway. So:
Is it better (for performance) to have four 1K tiles instead of a single 4K tile? Or the same?
Are there ways to optimize UDIMs for Blender (cycles) renders?
Does anyone have experience working in Blender with models that have large numbers of UDIM tiles? Can you share any insight into what is “typical” maybe?
The question is:
What resolution do you need for your textures… and so UDIM might be a better choice to organize the. Also every UDIM can be of different size…
Also while you ask about performance: UDIM (afaik) was not for games but for VFX and maybe for the highres model to back from to the lowres…
So in the pro leaque it was always:
If your system can’t handle it then buy (or rent) the next best (or over next) graphicard, cpu , memory even complete system (because someone will have and use it).
It comes down to texel size for each mesh object. The relation to the scale of the environment - if an object is large, like the standard cube, then it will need 4k. A smaller part maybe 512x512, so join it with another or more of that size part and use a 4K to cover four to 8 more mesh of that size.
UV Mapping and texel size is critical before even haphazardly applying a scheme of UDIM. Maybe better to treat each part as a separate object and work out the uv there, then bring them back into one so as to arrange on UDIM tiles and get a better feel for how much texture you really need.