When you’re rendering with Arnold, convert your texture maps to .tx files with maketx. Always 🙂

.tx textures are better because they are:

• Tiled (usually the tiles are 64×64 pixels).

  Arnold loads one tile at a time, as needed, rather than loading the entire texture map in memory. So textures are loaded faster, because Arnold loads only what it needs to render the image.

  Arnold uses a texture cache system to efficiently manage texture memory usage: only the most recently used tiles are kept in memory. You can have hundreds, or even thousands, of 4k and 8k images, and Arnold will never use more runtime memory than the user-specified max cache size.

• Mip-mapped.

  Mip-mapped textures are anti-aliased, even at low AA sample settings.

If you don’t convert your texture maps with maketx, the default Arnold behavior is to auto-tile and auto-map your textures for you, but this is very inefficient because it is done once for every rendered frame, rather than one-time-only with maketx.

• Textures [MtoA] [SItoA] [C4DtoA]
• Global texture render settings [MtoA] [SItoA] [C4DtoA]
• Per texture settings [MtoA] [SItoA] [C4DtoA]