[Bf-funboard] image tiling for distributed rendering

[Tom M]

this is sort of stream of conscious but might be nice, useful idea for
saving bandwidth and ram for distibuted rendering...

<LetterRip> is it easy/fast to load a specific chunk of an image?
<LetterRip> if not something that occurred to me would be to prechunk
your images prior to rendering
<LetterRip> so then you just load up the tile you want
<LetterRip> that way if part of a distributed render only needs a bit
of a full texture to render
<LetterRip> you don't need to pass the whole thing across the network
<LetterRip> and don't waste all of the ram
<LetterRip> of loading the entire texture
<LetterRip> another useful thing might be to predo levels of detail
for the texture so that it is already downsampled for distant shots
etc
<LetterRip> i was thinking take the compressed and turn it tile png version
<LetterRip> so each tile would still be compressed but it would be
lossless compared to the original compressed
<LetterRip> and could still be done as tiles
<LetterRip> hmm that would be a way to do a nice new format if it doesn't exist