Preparing Textures for Rendering

Texture File Format

For 3Delight for Maya to render efficiently with texture maps, texture file must be prepared and saved in a certain format. That format is a standard TIFF file augmented with mipmaps. This preparation can be either automatic or done manually.

Automatic Preparation through the Hypershade shading network

If an object is shaded using an Hypershade shading network that uses a texture file (any image file format via a node such as the File 2D texture node), 3Delight for Maya will automatically convert the texture to 3Delight’s efficient texture file format: a mipmap TIFF). And then use this file for rendering.

The automatic conversion is not necessary and not done if the file is already prepared. It is detected as already prepared in the following two cases:

1. The file extension is: .tdl 
2. The file extension is: .tdl.tif

It is possible to prepare the texture file manually (and have it saved with the above extension) in order to avoid this automatic conversion which will inevitably slow down the rendering process.

Manual Preparation of Texture Files

3Delight for Maya comes with a command line tool named 'tdlmake' to prepare texture file for efficient rendering. The prepared texture file should have the '.tdl' extension, or with the '.tdl.tif' extension if you want to keep the ability to open and view the texture in the tool of your choice that support the TIFF image format. The prepared texture file can then be used directly in an Hypershade node such as the File 2D texture node. Refer to section "3.3 Using the Texture Optimizer - tdlmake" of the 3Delight Studio Pro Documentation for more details on the command line tool.