Texture Map Efficiency

Today has been a day for a lot of forward thinking and grunt work. My renders had been taking me about and hour and a half for the far establishing shot of the row of apartments, which was not all that surprising considering I was either pumping in my near-highest or highest resolution texture bitmaps into my shaders. For example, the brick facade of the hero apartment was using 2048x4096 (width x height) maps for its color, bump and specularity. As you can see in my renders, this building does not even fill the 1080-pixel height of the frame, so I was in effect using four times the necessary resolution. I had actually built my texture in Photoshop at a 4096x8192 resolution (because we get very close in some of the shots), and was leaving the high-res bitmaps in my shaders for the time being so that I could worry about building the other textures. Now, however, that most of my texturing is completed, I can down-res texture maps for using in more distant shots, such as the establishing one. I'm simply taking the existing full-res TIFs into Photoshop, and downsampling to the appropriate resolution.

I have found that although Photoshop says that Bicubic sampling is "Best for Reduction," images such as fine-grained wood look much better when I use Bilinear sampling.

I've also revised my naming conventions so that they follow this pattern: __.

So, for example, the bump map at various resolutions for the hero facade is:
ext_facade_brick_hero_bump_2005_512x1024.tif
ext_facade_brick_hero_bump_2005_1024x2048.tif
ext_facade_brick_hero_bump_2005_2048x4096.tif

Because luckily Windows organizes files correctly by number, 512 comes before 1024, I don't have to use framepadding (e.g. "0512" instead of "512"), so I get a slight break in that respect.

I'm compiling a list of what resolutions of each texture maps are needed for each shot, so that I can help make my renders go as efficiently as possible.