I'm here -- and I wrote the photoshop parser.
When you use .PSD files as image clip, XSI loads the pre-composited image that is stored at the start of the file.
So it doesn't take any more RAM or time than any other format. Even if your .psd file is huge, it's not going to read any more than that composite image.
The drawback is that Mental Ray doesn't support reading this format, so XSI will be passing the image's bits to MR as a memory block, and that defeats some mental ray lazy-loading memory management features, and you can't convert them to .map files.
If you generate an .mi2 file, that means it will contain a large binary dump of the image, instead of only the file name, which is a problem on a render farm.
If you don't care about .mi2 file size and you don't render very large scenes which might benefit from texture tiling and mininal loading, or if you don't care about mental ray at all, then you don't need to worry about this.
The Fx Tree indeed allows you extra individual layers, but not layer groups.
> From: Bradley Gabe
>
>
> Hi Nathan-
>
> Any chance you have an escalation account from EA with Soft? In the
> event Halfdan or Luc Eric miss your question out here, that would be a
> better venue for the inside scoop on such things.
>
> Also, if nobody answers you there, you have someone to
> complain to in an
> official capacity. ;-)
>
> -Brad
>
> > Does anyone on this list know the workings of PSD usage in XSI?
> > Mainly, after itâs loaded does it take a substantial amount more of
> > memory than a .tga or .tiff would?
> >
> >
> >
> > It appears after looking, that once they are loaded, using that
> > âmaximize compatibilityâ function in Photoshop, that itâs just loads
> > the top, composite node.
> >
> >
> >
> > Anyone have any hard evidence of this?
> >
> > Nathan Turner
> >
> > EA-chicago
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