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I've been using the new Cycles Baking branch that Dalai Felinto is working on and have noticed that when adding textures to materials, the render time goes up substantially when the textures are very large such as 2048x2048 or higher.

So basically, for the object to render fast then the textures that are applied to the object must first be scaled down to something more reasonable like 1024x1024.

This breaks the workflow and makes managing textures difficult since having multiple copies of textures at various resolutions can be difficult.

Alright so to the point, I would like to be able to load in large textures but to have Cycles recognize them as smaller than they really are.

Ideally there would be a node that has various texture dimensions which can be specified and connected to the image Texture node but I do not see one.

I think the compositor has something like this but apparently, for now, not Cycles. Does anyone know of a work around that can help with this?

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  • $\begingroup$ You can specify the size of the texture mapping in cycles, but afaik you can't actually modify the image (e.g. change the number of pixels) with shader nodes. $\endgroup$ – gandalf3♦ Mar 13 '14 at 21:36
  • $\begingroup$ This would be a great feature though $\endgroup$ – gandalf3♦ Jul 25 '14 at 1:47
  • $\begingroup$ If you are baking, why don't you use a smaller texture to bake to? $\endgroup$ – someonewithpc Jul 31 '14 at 19:17
  • $\begingroup$ The problem is that we are currently required to change the scale of a texture using an external texture editor once an image has been saved. It requires a lot of back and forth between different programs and failing to properly re-sync the different programs can also cause problems. $\endgroup$ – MarcClintDion Oct 24 '14 at 1:31
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No, there's not a way to modify the actual resolution of a texture with shader nodes.

The solution would be to bake to a lower resolution to begin with.

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