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- Textures should be named appropriately based on their destined effect and object assignment. For example: <object>_<effect>.jpg or possibly tableTop_specular.jpg
- Do not use spaces and special characters in names like: theCar&boat.jpg or "the Car and Boat.jpg"
- Do not use spaces and special characters in file paths either. These textures may fail to load.
- Texture sequences should have a clear naming convention for frame number. mySequence.0001.jpg is correct rather than mySequence0001.jpg or mySequence.jpg.0001
- Most formats can be used such as .png, exr, .tif, and .jpg, but to be rendered they must be converted to the .tex format. In Maya this happens when you begin a render and cached on disk to be reused until changed or updated in the scene. Scenes with many textures may take awhile to convert the first time to render.
- Occasionally interchangeable naming pairs occur, consistency is important to your pipeline and artist's ability to work accurately.
- Diffuse and Albedo
- Roughness and Glossiness (please take note that RenderMan uses the standard "Roughness" convention where 0 = mirrored and 1 = rough or nearly diffuse) Roughness also applies to a Diffuse parameter so occasionally artists substitute Glossiness as the name.
- Textures can be color (RGB) and scalar (greyscale) and color channels can be connected to matching parameters to drive them. For example, the Red channel of an image can use used to drive a scalar (float slider) if it's useful.
- Normal maps are typically preferred over bump maps (scalar or grayscale) for their detail.
- Linear color workflow is highly recommended and textures where their color is visible in the final render should be linearized (the typical sRGB gamma curve should be removed for rendering). Textures used as data like bump, masks, and displacement, should not be linearized.
- Displacement maps and other data textures should be the highest precision possible to avoid artifacts from texture quantizing. Usually these are exported from modeling applications as floating point EXR or Tiff. See workflows for normal and scalar displacement.
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