Is there a limit of how many textures you can stack? (8?)

[basvanbergen]

Hi,

I'm trying to stack a lot of textures (10) all on one mesh, this is needed as I need to control each separate texture individually. This works fine in the IPR, but as soon as I try to render this, the buckets get stuck on the particular mesh with all the textures. (renders unrealistically slow)

I've tried all kinds of workarounds

-stack individual texture tags using the alpha

-a layer color (which is limited to 8), piped into a layer shader where I combine the other textures.

-even a slightly bigger/extruded mesh with part of the textures, and the opaque in the parameters checked off

-adding a custom AOV with a 'aov_write_rgba' with part of the textures so I can comp them in later on, also get the buckets stuck...

But every time I near the 8 textures, the render hangs.

I've also played with the transparency depth and the clamp sample values. All to no avail.

Am I approaching this wrong, or is this just a technical limitation of Arnold? Is there a workaround that I haven't thought of yet?

I hope someone could help me.

All the best,

Bas

[basvanbergen]

Okay, it seems to be related to the texture size, Resized all my textures from 4k to 2k, which seems to fix it for now. Now I need to see what textures are good enough at that lower resolution...

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

First of all there's a limitation of stacking maximum 8 materials (texture tags) at the moment. If you need more you have to use multiple layer shaders in one material. So your method "a layer color (which is limited to 8), piped into a layer shader where I combine the other textures" should work. I just tested a render with 10 4k textures and was not really slow, so I'm not sure what's going on. Do you use tx textures (or auto tx on)? I would take a look if you can share the scene.