Using the Texture Optimizer - tdlmake

 tdlmake preprocesses TIFF, PNG, JPEG, GIF, IFF(6), SGI, PIC(7), PSD(8), TGA(9), "bake," Radiance and OpenEXR files to convert them into an efficient texture format suitable to 3Delight. It can also convert a zfile into a shadow map. We recommend running tdlmake on all textures before rendering, for two reasons:

1.  tdlmake creates a mipmapped version of the original texture, allowing 3Delight to produce nicer images more efficiently.
2. 3Delight employs a caching mechanism for texture data which works well with tiled images. Using raw (striped) non-converted TIFFs may degrade overall performance.

Note that a converted file is a normal TIFF that can be viewed with any image viewer. We suggest using a `.tdl' extension for 3Delight texture files.