Textures List and Texture Picker

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Mihai Iliuta (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 06 Dec, 2012Version comment
3 min read

Textures List panel

This panel lists all the textures that are used in the scene. It also displays useful information about your textures, such as type, color depth, size (resolution) and location on disk.

  

The Textures List panel

Texture Picker

Clicking on any texture icon will bring up the Texture Picker, which allows you to load a texture, and adjust its brightness, contrast and saturation, or change the tiling of the texture on the object.

 

Detail of the Texture Picker
  • 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 selecting in the dropdown menu.
  • Unload a texture: Select a previously loaded texture from the dropdown menu and click the Unload button to remove it from the scene. This will free up some memory.
  • Full View: View a texture in full size. You can also use the image control sliders in the full view window, although the texture will not update in real time. It will update after you have made a change.
  • Refresh: Reload a texture in case you have edited it in an external image editing application.
  • Switch Display Size: Switch the thumbnail texture view to a small or a large preview for easier viewing of texture changes.

There are also several parameters to control the Projection Properties and Image Properties. 

Projection Properties

These parameters control the placement and tiling of a texture on the object.

  • Method: Tile your texture in X axis, Y axis, both the X and Y axis, or do not use any tiling at all (no repeat).
  • Relative/Meters: The amount of tiling for a texture can be set in the texture coordinates (Relative), or in real scale in meters (Meters). Maxwell Render will use a 1m x 1m x 1m UV set for the texture when the Meters option is selected, regardless of the actual size of the object and what other UV sets may be applied to the object. This is very useful to create re-usable materials which can simply be dragged & dropped on an object of any size. For example, if you want to create a material with 25cm tiles, check the Meters mode, and set the tiling for both X and Y axis to 0.25. Now you can drop this material on a floor of any size and your tiles will always be 25cm. For more detailed info see the page Working with UV sets and textures in Studio.
  • Repeat: Specify the tiling amount (number of repetitions of the texture) in the desired axis.
  • Offset: Select the amount of offset for the X, Y axis.
Image Properties

The Image Properties area is an image editor where you can make simple adjustments:

  • Invert: Invert the loaded texture. This is useful for black & white textures used as a weightmap or mask.
  • Alpha Only: On RGBA images (images that contain its Alpha channel embedded), this option considers only the Alpha channel, mainly for masking purposes.
  • Interpolation: Turning this option on applies filtering to a texture, which may be useful to avoid pixelization when rendering close-ups of smaller textures. Filtering is useful mostly for displacement textures – to smooth out the displaced surface – especially when using 8bit textures. It is recommended to keep this option turned off for regular textures (color, bump, weightmaps, etc.) to avoid blurring them.
  • Brightness/Contrast/Saturation: 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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