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Clicking on any texture icon will bring up the Texture Picker, which allows you to load a bitmap or create a procedural texture, and adjust its brightness, contrast and saturation, or change the tiling of the texture on the object. The panel is divided into four main areas:
- The Bitmap section
- The Procedurals section
- The Projection properties
- The Image properties
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Bitmap Section
This area gives you access to load a texture file from disk in any of the supported bitmap formats (Png, Tga, Jpg, Tiff, Exr, Hdr, Jpg2000, Bmp).
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The Texture Picker showing a loaded Bitmap texture
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Tools available in the Bitmap section
- Load texture: To choose a texture, click on the Load button or drag & drop a texture from any Explorer or desktop window into the main frame. You can drag & drop multiple textures at once. The textures will become available for selection in the dropdown menu.
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- Switch Display Size: Switch the thumbnail texture view to a small or a large preview for easier viewing of texture changes.
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Procedurals Section
This area allows you to create and adjust procedural textures and arrange them in the procedurals stack. When a procedural texture is selected, its parameters panel pops up at the margin of the Texture Picker. You can apply several procedurals which are evaluated from bottom to top (just like Photoshop layers). Procedurals are useful because they are fully customizable and present infinite detail independent to the resolution, but they are a bit slower to render compared to bitmaps. This is why Maxwell offers the option to bake any procedural to a bitmap file to be used instead.
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The Texture Picker showing a Procedural texture and its parameters
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Tools available in the Procedurals section and the Procedurals stack
- New: Creates a new procedural from the list of supported procedurals.
- Remove: Removes the selected procedural from the stack.
- Arrows Up and Down: Moves the selected procedural up and down in the stack. The procedurals are evaluated from bottom to top (just like the Photoshop layers) so this allows you to control their order to get the look you want.
- Save to disk: Allows you to bake the selected procedural to a bitmap file at the given image resolution and replaces the procedural with its corresponding baked bitmap version if required.
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- if you choose so. Please note that if you try to bake a very detailed procedural texture to a small resolution file, the resulting bitmap file will not look the same as the procedural. This is because there are not enough pixels in that small bitmap file to describe accurately what the procedural looked like. In this case you should bake the procedural to a larger size bitmap file.
Projection Properties
These parameters control the placement and tiling of a texture on the object.
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- Mirror Y and Mirror Y: Uses the texture rmirrored in the X or Y axis (or both).
- Offset: Selects the amount of offset for the X, Y axis.
- Rotation: Rotates the texture the given angle in degrees in its own UV space.
Image Properties
The Image Properties area is an image editor where you can make simple adjustments:
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- Brightness/Contrast/Saturation/Hue: Common image editing options useful for fine-tuning a texture without having to use an external image editing application.
- RGB Clamp: Adjust the levels of your image. This function enables you to specify the maximum darkest or brightest values in the texture. For example, if you change the min Clamp from 0 to 30, any value in the texture darker than RGB 30 will be set to 30.
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