Memory - mapped textures?

Hello,
I will be rendering a huge scene with big textures in a while. I was wandering, if does blender render or Cycles support any kind of memory mapped texture formats. Since my technical knowledge comes from Maya, Houdini environment, I was used to work with textures converted into *.map (Maya) or *.rat (random access texture - Houdini), so that the renderer loads into memory just the part that is used, thus reducing the textures memory footprint.

I know EXR and 16-TIFFs can be mip-mapped but thats not what I am looking for. It can reduce the used amount of memory when far, but when a texture plane will be near the camera, will be always loaded entirely to the memory.

Any ideas?
Thanks,

Simon Sedmak

Short answer: Basically, no.

Long answer: It’s supported in Cycles with the OSL backend using the OIIO .tx format, but OSL has an inherent speed penalty, plus it doesn’t work with GPU. You also have zero control over how the map cache behaves (size limit, flushing, handling of un-tiled images), and there isn’t a simple way of converting already loaded textures over to .tx. You have to manually run them through MakeTx and replace the paths. It’s not supported at all (yet) with the normal SVM shader backend. You can still use .tx textures, but Cycles will load all tiles at the start of the render.