the PNG files have compatibility problems.. for example Mental Images only support the 8 bit - because it's still considered a 'web format' by some - and some application deal differently with its alpha or color mapping. Also, LZW compression is small but slow.
There are all these other 8-bit RLE formats which are more specific to this industry.. SGI, TGA, wavefront RLA.. then there is the TIFF, the ever-popular bmp, and then we get to the lesser supported like softimage pic, Alias, they're all 8-bit RLE.
in our tool we can only spend extra time to optimize for speed the most popular used, Pic, SGI and targa.
if you ship out animation I recommend using quicktime movies with the animation codec -- it's losses RLE too, and I'm fairly sure we store alpha in it in XSI.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Laffey
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Francois Lord wrote:
> > Yes. PNG. Best lossless format around. It supports 8 and 16
> bits, interlace,
> > and it's open source. You can even create a Quicktime in
> PNG and it will keep
> > the alpha.
>
>
> PNG is a great format I use a lot for 16 bit and 8 bit.
> However, I did
> have some troubles loading (large) 16bit PNG files into XSI
> as textures. I
> was running into case where they would not load and would render as
> no_icons. Switching to uncompressed 16bit TIF format fixed
> the problem.
>
> So I now avoid using PNGs as textures.
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