Textures

TEXTUREs

FurryBall supports only file textures and in some cases Layered textures at the moment. See Materials, Lights and Hair Node sections for information about what attributes can be connected to textures.

To render scene with textures Textures feature has to be enabled in currently active render node (see Render Settings Node section).

Attributes

These image file formats are supported when loading file textures:

BMP
JPEG
PNG
DDS
TIFF
GIF
WMP
OpenEXR (experimental).

Image sequence can be used. Also Gain and Offset parameters in Color Balance section are fully supported.

File names for image sequence must be in specific format: name.number.ext, where name is any text (or nothing), number must be in format with same number of digits (for example: 0000 - 1890, or 00-78, ...) and ext is files extension. Important are dots before ext and number!

Cache

When file texture is loaded it is converted to a DDS data format (if not already in DDS), compressed (if compression is enabled), prefiltered and saved to a temporary cache directory (see Quick Start - Installing section). If a texture with the same name and path is about to be loaded anytime on the same system FurryBall always checks its cache and uses cached version if any to minimize loading/processing time. If the original texture is modified FurryBall detects it and creates a new cache entry.

It is recommended to use DDS file format when rendering with FurryBall, images can be converted to DDS using Adobe Photoshop with NVIDIA Photoshop plugin. It is possible to choose data format, filter type for prefiltering and other DDS parameters using the Photoshop plugin. This can save some processing time because FurryBall uses DDS image file format internally.

Memory Usage

Textures are loaded (or generated) once they are needed and kept in memory until new scene is opened or Maya is closed. Textures usually need huge amounts of memory compared to geometry and it can be useful to release them when not needed if video/system memory is limited. To release textures use Clear Textures button in render node (see Render Settings Node section).

Special Attributes

There is no settings node for textures, special attributes are part of Maya file texture node.

EXTRA ATTRIBUTES

Online Update - This is only useful when 3D painting using Maya 3D Paint Tool, it is sometimes necessary to enable this parameter to see texture update immediately when painting on object. Keep this enabled only when 3D painting and disable when done as it forces FurryBall to reload the texture every frame. 3D painting with FurryBall is still an experimental feature.

Compress Color - FurryBall uses compression (BC3) for color textures (bumps are always uncompressed) by default. The compression method is lossy. If blocky artefacts are visible it is possible to disable compression of the texture here. Note that DDS textures use data format they were saved with and this parameter has no affect on them. Also note that the compression format is not suitable for textures with alpha channel, if the texture is to be used as a transparency map using alpha channel, it is highly recommended you disable the compression.

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