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 kind of image file 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 (mipmap TIFF) and then use this file for rendering. It is possible to prepare the texture file manually in order to avoid this automatic conversion.

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.  It 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.