Textures - Arnold for 3ds Max
Further Reading |
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See Textures in the Arnold User Guide |
The Arnold for 3ds Max User Guide explains how to work with Arnold textures in the 3ds Max user interface. The Arnold User Guide provides the full documentation for Arnold textures. |
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 |
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<tile> | texture _u1_v1.tx | texture |
_u1_v1 |
<udim> | texture_v0001.tx | texture_v0001. |
1001, 1002, 1003 etc |
Tile
When using the
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