What Is Channel Packing? | Channel Packing Series

[@Strelokos666]

Damn I can't stop being surprised of every discovered video I actually needed. Finally someone who's covering all the texture stuff.

[@GetLearnt]

Ha, I'm happy you've been enjoying them! I definitely cover more fringe topics, but I'm really surprised that channel packing isn't talked about more here on YT!

[@MaximilianonMars]

I had some questions on what the different maps do and found your channel offering very clear answers presented incredibly well. Thank you very much!

[@GetLearnt]

My pleasure! Happy to help out. :)

[@mae2309]

I need this in my life. Thank you.. ALL IN ONE TEXTURES.

[@GetLearnt]

Happy to help! Really is a stroke of ingenuity, such a great tool for artists! :)

[@mae2309]

@@GetLearnt most defo. taking my textures as all in one to unreal is just time consuming and not as heavy.. game changer...

[@RichOBrien]

Superb explanation and delivery

[@GetLearnt]

Thanks for watching! Stay tuned for some application-based uses in the coming weeks! :)

[@mae2309]

Let the series begin

[@GetLearnt]

Yessir! Stay tuned each Monday in November! :D

[@jairoquick]

This is a great way to reduce the size of huge texture maps for videogames, needless to say that 8k-16k texture maps can take up to 100-200mb the whole package for a single mesh. That's an insane amount of storage taken JUST by texture maps. Would love to see more examples about this technique being used in the industry

[@GetLearnt]

Absolutely, there is significant potential for optimizations when you consider a single texture could take up that much space, and its effects in-game are hardly noticeable. In future videos, we take a look at how we can channel pack using various software. :)

[@karthikvasudevan5741]

im having trouble with using packed textures in Maya Arnold. Could you please help me with that

[@GetLearnt]

Hey, unfortunately I've never used Arnold so I won't know it's specific nodes. Is there any option for you to access an image's specific colour channels?

[@tjseries3057]

I see, and substance painter does that for unreal engine and unity (for ambient occlusion, metallic and roughness)

[@GetLearnt]

We're going to take a look at Substance Painter in more depth in a later episode, but ya SP gives us a lot of options out of the box to channel pack! :)

[@nv7287]

Great tutorial!

[@GetLearnt]

Thanks, my pleasure!

[@eduardobinks]

When doing the channel packing, I should export the texture as a sRGB or linear? My normals are not working correctly with this method I cant figure out why

[@GetLearnt]

It would likely be best to export as linear because although the combination of the three channels produces a colour image, what you are actually looking to export is the data held within each of those individual channels, which is ultimately grayscale. Are you channel packing your normal map in any way?

[@eduardobinks]

@@GetLearnt thank you for you awser. Yes, I'm packing NMO (Normal, metal, occlusion). I'm using the "derive normal z" node in unreal to achieve the normals from the RG channel.

[@GetLearnt]

@@eduardobinks Ah that'll be the issue. You'll be able to pack a texture in the B channel, but you need to leave the R and G channels for the normal map for that to work correctly, since that node requires those two channels to build the third one. I'd say move that metallic map somewhere else and it should be good to go!

[@felixmikolai7375]

wich free programm can i use and how? i tried gimp but it wont let me copy my roughness into a alpha channel :s

[@GetLearnt]

Ya GIMP can be a little finicky with that stuff. You can try to use photopea.com, I'm not sure if it will work but there's a possibility!

[@Motion_artistry_by_nikita]

Wowww such an awesome content

[@GetLearnt]

Thanks for checking it out, I hope it's been helpful! :)

[@darty367]

Hey, thanks for the video, I'm curious to see the difference between packed and no packed textures in a project, do you save a lot of space or it's just a small percentage ?

[@GetLearnt]

Obviously mileage may very. This optimization is most noticeable if you are uniquely texturing a lot of things. So for a project that doesn't have many assets, you won't notice any change to performance. If you need to texture hundreds to thousands of buildings for a city, however, there may be a valid case for it!

[@Martial-Mat]

Is this only valuable for game design?

[@GetLearnt]

Good question! The benefits are really only worthwhile for games because it needs to render everything real-time, and the players need to download all the textures on their PC in order for the game to load them. Film, by contrast, doesn't have that same requirement because all you would be providing the consumer is a pre rendered video, so the amount of textures really doesn't matter. :)

[@Martial-Mat]

@@GetLearnt Thanks for that. I simply render for art, not film, so I'm a producer, not an end user. When some of my scenes have dozens of 4k textures, I thought that this might be useful, but do the main rendering apps even SUPPORT channel packing?

[@GetLearnt]

@@Martial-Mat Channel Packing is still very useful for the development end as well, since that's also less images your project needs to load each time it loads up! And and modeling/game engine that allows you to develop your own custom shaders will absolutely support channel packing, since the only real requirement is needing access to the RGBA channels of an image. So Max, Maya, Blender, Unreal, Unity and others all have you covered. :)

[@tiedie]

FIRST

[@GetLearnt]

Even beat me to it, I forgot I scheduled this for today. 😆