When using Arnold, it is best to use a tiled and mipmapped texture format such as .exr or .tx.

By default, Arnold automatically creates tx files. This is controlled by the Auto-convert Textures to TX option in the Arnold Render Settings.

If you disable auto-tx, you can create tx files with maketx.

A tutorial that covers this process can be found here.

Flush Caches

If you need to modify texture while you are rendering, you have the following options:

• Use the Flush Caches ->Textures command.
• Disable Auto-mipmap and Auto-tile options while you are modifying textures. With this option, you will not have any preprocess before each render.

_{The Flush Caches menu can be found within the Arnold menubar in the main application window}

Maketx

Maketx is a command-line utility to convert images to tiled, MIP-mapped textures, similar to txmake in Pixar Renderman. It is part of OpenImageIO (http://www.openimageio.org) and was developed by Larry Gritz at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

• A tutorial that shows the workflow involved when working with .tx files can be found here.
• Do not linearize textures used to drive scalar values as you will lose precision values.
• The maketx utility is available in the MAXtoA plugin folder. In Windows this would be: C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins\MAXtoA_2022

Mip-Mapping Bias

This parameter is visible in the image shader. MIP-mapping Bias offsets the Mip-Map level from which a texture is sampled.

Tokens

MAXtoA supports the following texture tokens, including both the <tile> (Mudbox) and <udim> (Mari) tokens.

Examples

Token	Texture Name	Texture Path	Result
<tile>	texture _u1_v1.tx	texture.tx	_u1_v1
<udim>	texture_v0001.tx	texture_v0001..tx	1001, 1002, 1003 etc

Tile

When using the  token, multiple textures can be used to cover a model, rather than a single, much larger, texture.

_{Image map with <tile> texture token}

UDIM values are a way of representing the integer coordinates of a texture, from the coordinates of its bottom-left corner in UV space.

_{Image map with the <udim> tag}