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Shading

File

Lets you use an image file as a 2D texture.

To learn more about File textures and how to create them, see File textures.

Find this texture in the Create bar. To apply this texture as a texture map, see Map a 2D or 3D texture.

Filter Type

The sampling technique applied to the image file during rendering. The Quadratic, Quartic, and Gaussian filters only work when the File texture is mapped directly to a shading group. The default setting is Quadratic.

If off, there is no filtering. For games design, this can be useful to view a texture’s pixels without interpolation by the renderer.

Tips The quadratic filter type provides the best quality to cost ratio. With the default settings, this filtering scheme provides crisper details than mipmap, at a reasonable cost. IFF image file format is optimal for performance.

Quadratic, Quartic, Gaussian

Types of bell curves, in which the extreme values get less weight than values toward the center of the curve.

Extreme means points in the texture near the far edge of the filter’s sample region.

Center of the curve means the center of the region being filtered.

Quadratic and Quartic approximate the Gaussian filter type, but are optimized for speed. Since this method can decrease rendering speed, use mostly for high-quality rendering. Quadratic is the most efficient filter type.

Mipmap

Mipmap stores values starting with values averaged at a large texture map size, and linearly decreasing map sizes down to a single pixel value.

Use this filter for previewing—it’s fast and provides moderately good results. Do not use for high quality renders, however. Textures may swim or appear blurry.

Mipmap is inexpensive to use. Maya uses it as a technique to store color values by default. The performance cost associated with using the Mipmap filter type is negligible compared to using other filter types.

Box

Uses a simple box sampling method for the texture map. Each sample of the map is given the same shading sample weight. The Box filter uses the sum of the values sampled divided by the number of samples taken.

Pre-Filter

The Pre-Filter and Pre-Filter Radius attributes are used to correct file textures that are aliased or contain noise in unwanted areas. This can be very useful when displacement mapping.

When on, the image file is pre-filtered to cancel out noise and aliasing which helps provide better quality results, particularly for bump maps. Pre-Filter is off by default. Turn it on to enable the Pre-Filter Radius attribute.

Pre-Filter Radius

Determines the size of the filtering radius. The default value of 2.0 works for most images, but you can increase the radius to provide even smoother results.

Image Name

The name of the image file or movie file used by the File texture.

For tips on creating images for File textures, see Considerations for creating file textures.

To use a sequence of image files to create an animation, the file name must be expressed in one of the following three formats:

name.#.ext

name.ext.#

name.#

where name is the base name of the file; # is the frame number (with or without leading 0s), ext is the file extension of the file.

To use a sequence of image files to create an animated file texture, the file extensions must be separated from the basename and, or the extension by periods.

For example, the following works:

test.1.iff

test.0001.iff

test.1

test.0001

test.iff.1

test.iff.0001

But the following would not work:

test1

test0001

test1.iff

test0001.iff

Reload

Use this to force a refresh (read from disk to temporary memory) of the texture. This is recommended in situations where textures being used are updated by other artists.

Edit

Launches an external application from Maya so that you can edit your textures. The default system image editor is used, unless a specific application is specified in the Application preferences. For more information, see Application preferences.

View

Launches an external application from Maya so that you can view your textures. The default system image viewer is used, unless a specific application is specified in the Application preferences. For more information, see Application preferences.

Use BOT

Use block ordered textures.

If the image file is not a BOT file, Maya creates a temporary BOT file for the image file during rendering. This can make rendering slower and can increase the amount of disk space used during rendering. However, it uses less memory during the rendering process. Because of this, converting all image file textures to BOT files before rendering using the Optimize Scene command can be helpful.

Disable File Load

If set, then the texture is not loaded. Instead a grey color is output in place of the image.

Use Image Sequence
Image Number
Frame Offset

To use a sequence of image files as an animated texture when rendering, turn on Use Image Sequence. Use Image Sequence is off by default.

When using an image sequence, you can keyframe the Image Number value (it’s automatically keyed to 1 by default). In addition, you can offset the Image Number keyframe by entering a frame number in Frame Offset.

Interactive Sequence Caching Options

Use Interactive Sequence Caching

Interactive Sequence Caching is used for caching file textures when animating textures to play the animation at regular speed.

When Use Interactive Sequence Caching is on, the file textures you specify within the range of the Sequence Start, Sequence End, and Sequence Increment are loaded into memory only once. This provides faster interactive animation of the file textures.

Turn Use Interactive Sequence Caching on to get better performance when:

• using a sequence of frames for the file textures
• using Hardware texturing in the 3d view
• you need to scrub along the time line (move the time slider back and forth) and see the animated texture update.

Use the following attributes to indicate which frames you want to load. If you don’t load them all, Maya uses the closest available frame at playback.

Note These attributes do not alter the final rendered image.

Sequence Start

The number of the first frame Maya loads into memory when Use Interactive Sequence Caching is on.

Sequence End

The number of the last frame Maya loads into memory when Use Interactive Sequence Caching is on.

Sequence Increment

Controls how many frames are skipped (if any) Maya loads into memory when Use Interactive Sequence Caching is on. If 1, Maya loads every frame between Sequence Start and Sequence End. If 2, Maya loads every second frame, and so on.