Huge textures development - Memory limitations

[McWgogs]

Hello there.
Lately I've been making a level 9 moon texture. I've downloaded some big 16k maps from USGS; i have two huge images, one grayscale, and a flat one with color information. The next step is to combine them, but memory limitations prevent me to do so.

Here's the question:
Is there a utility out there that would cut the image to smaller pieces that i could work on and then put them all back together, so i can feed it to pltex?

 

[DanP]

Won't photoshop do the trick?

 

[jedidia]

If Photoshop won't eat it it is indeed very likely that you simply don't have enough RAM...

 

[McWgogs]

If Photoshop won't eat it it is indeed very likely that you simply don't have enough RAM...

I use paint shop pro 7 and i realize that i don't have enough ram.
I have 1Gm ram and 256 on my graphic card.

Still, that's not enough memory to combine two 16384x8192 textures at once, so i need a utility that would automaticly cut them into smaller pieces that i can work on and then reassemble them.

 

[McWgogs]

Anyone?

All i find on google are commercial tools like that.

 

[ar81]

If you can load one texture but not two, how about cutting it in half?
Then you process each half and then you put both together...

How about using GIMP?
You have some of the processing power of Photoshop for free.
You may find the links in the old M6 forum SDK sticky thread about how to make addons.

I am not sure if your problem is about memory or about memory usage of the program you are using.
Some non professional tools have problems to handle big images.
Picture Publisher is easier than Photoshop, the perfect choice for those who love easy to use software, but Photoshop is more efficient when handling memory, so for big images Picture Publisher has a crash or becomes sluggish while Photoshop works fine.
This is why a professional tool is professional...

 

[McWgogs]

Well i managed to merge the greyscale and color halfs of the texture.
Now i have to put them back together.
I tried to do this in Paint Shop, but it goes "not enough memory to complete task"
I'll try gimp.

 

[Woo482]

i can do It I have 4gb of memory

 

[ar81]

Well i managed to merge the greyscale and color halfs of the texture.
Now i have to put them back together.
I tried to do this in Paint Shop, but it goes "not enough memory to complete task"
I'll try gimp.

If Paint Shop does not have a very efficient usage of memory, big images could cause you to have that problem.

If the pointers of the program used to find memory addresses have certain type that limits the possible values for pointers, then the program itself could be limited by pointers and not memory.

In the case of Picture Publisher I had that problem, but the problem was that it did not even check for pointer values, it just crashed. Of course, that's an old software. It is great to make wor¡nderful and beautiful things for Orbiter, but when you need to work a hi-res poster for a commercial job, it is not the software of choice.

 

[McWgogs]

Ok, Gimp managed to merge them and save them (took quite a while) and now pltex.exe is busy processing the level 9 texture.
I'll be probably releasing in a few hours,
Thanks everyone for the feedback.

 

[ar81]

I knew it was going to work.
I had a similar problem some years ago.
Fortunately it was not for a commercial project.
Hours of work were lost in a CTD...