db&w Support Forum

Hi,

Just thought I'd list some uses for infiniMap Pro that have come in handy for me that may not be obvious at first glance.
Clearly infiniMap is great for handling very very large images, you can map (planar, spherical, cylindrical, cubic, front, UV
and an additional type not available in the regular LightWave surface settings Spherical Section) these huge
images to the R,G,B and Alpha channels of your surface, you can use them for the color, luminosity, diffuse, specularity,
glossiness, reflection, transparancy, refraction, translucency and bump. But here are some additional
uses for infiniMap Pro.

1. Scene Load time Optimization. Since infiniMap Pro does not load the image when the scene is loaded, you can use it
    for all your texture maps (even the not so large ones) and this will speed up your scene load times greatly.
    infiniMap only loads the image (and even then at the detail level necessary) if the renderer is rendering a surface
    which uses the image. Otherwise infiniMap can use proxy lowres images that you can give it to use for the OpenGL
    Layout view. You might be thinking "if I use infiniMap Pro for my images in my scene, my scene won't be very
    portable since other LightWave 3D users may not own infiniMap Pro". Well don't worry about that, since everyone
    can download a free version of infiniMap Pro which will read in and render all LightWave scenes that use
    infiniMap. This inclues full Screamernet support. The only restriction is that the other users can not modify the
    infiniMap Pro surfaces, by that I mean change the projection type of the image, it's scale etc.

2. Layout memory usage optimization. If you use infiniMap Pro for handling your images in Layout, as soon as you
    delete all surfaces that are referencing a given image, that image will be completely unloaded and will take up 0K of
    memory from Layout. This is in contrast to the way Layout handles images, which is once an image is loaded
    into the image editor, it will stay there, even if no surface is using it.

hope the above is of some help,
Zareh