Houdini plugin - Texture properties

Owned by
Peter Horvath (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 24 Jan, 2015
3 min read

Each texture of the material components has special properties which can be set in a dialog window after pressing the button next to the texture field. Read more...

 

Projection properties

  • Channel: specifies the UV set (set of UV coordinates) to be used for the texture. An object can have several UV sets in Maxwell Render, for example a cubic and spherical UV set. The UV sets are numbered from 0.
  • Method: specifies the tiling method of the texture. Possible values are:
    • X axis
    • Y axis
    • Both X and Y axis
    • No tiling
  • Relative / Meters: specifies the tiling mode.
    • Relative: the amount of tiling is set in texture coordinates.
    • Meters: the amount of tiling is set in real scale (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 useful to create re-usable materials independently of the size of the object.
  • Repeat: specifies the tiling amount (number of repetitions) of the texture.
  • Mirror: uses the texture rmirrored in the X or Y axis (or both).
  • Offset: specifies the amount of offset for the X, Y axis.
  • Rotation: rotates the texture by the given angle in degrees in its own UV space.

Image properties

  • Invert: inverts the loaded texture. This is useful for black & white textures used as a weightmap or mask.
  • Alpha Only: uses only the alpha channel of the image when it exists.
  • Interpolation: applies filtering to the texture which is useful to avoid pixelization of smaller textures. Filtering is handy mostly for displacement textures – to smooth out the displaced surface – especially when using 8bit textures. But interpolation can cause blurring to regular (color, bump, weightmap, etc.) textures.
  • Brightness: specifies the brightness of the texture for fine-tuning.
  • Contrast: specifies the contrast of the texture for fine-tuning.
  • Saturation: specifies the saturation of the texture for fine-tuning.
  • Hue: specifies the hue of the texture for fine-tuning.
  • RGB Clamp: specifies the maximum darkest or brightest values in the texture.

Normal map properties

When editing normal map properties, the options Flip X, Flip Y, and Wide specify how the normal map was created. The most common standard is ‘Flip Y’, so this is selected by default. This option depends on the application used to create the normal map.

Procedurals

You can specify a list of procedural textures in this area. Procedurals are useful because they are fully customizable and present infinite detail independent to the resolution, but they are slower to render than bitmaps. This is why Maxwell offers the option to bake any procedural to a bimap file to be used instead. Procedural textures are SHOP nodes and can be found under Maxwell Render / Texture Procedurals in the TAB menu of the SHOP network.

To apply one or more procedural textures to the material you have to give the full paths of the procedural SHOP node separated with spaces, for example /shop/maxwell_brick1 /shop/maxwell_marble1. The procedurals are evaluated from left to right (just like the Photoshop layers).

See the list of available Procedural Textures.

UDIM / Tile textures

You can use the <udim> or <tile> token in the filename to define special texture types. It translates to a TiledTexture procedural with default settings.

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