The Texture Manager has one simple role: convert images to RenderMan's texture format, using txmake. It handles single images as well as texture atlases (UDIM, Mudbox, ZBrush).
You can add this pane to Houdini by selecting New Tab and choosing RenderMan Texture Manager at the bottom of the list for New Pane Type.
User interface
When you open a new scene, the Texture Manager will find all images used as textures and add them to a queue to convert them. The conversion settings will be based on a set of rules defined in a json file (see below).
Just press Parse Scene whenever you want new textures to be converted. Pick Image and Pick Directory allow you to pre-convert images without having to know how to use txmake.
...
- During interactive renders, the texture manager will add new textures to the queue and return a temporary texture until the conversion is done. Once done, it will send an update to the renderer and your texture will appear.
- When you start a Batch or a Preview render, you need all your textures to be converted first. Starting with 22.3, RfM will stop the conversion queue and add any remaining conversion task to the LocalQueue or Tractor job to ensure you always get the expected image.
Settings
Number of processes: How many txmake processes will be launched at the same time. The default is 2 but it is often beneficial to add more processes to speed up the queue.
Fallback Texture Path: By default, the texture manager saves the texture next to the source image. If, for any reason, it is impossible to save in that directory, the fallback texture path will be used.
Always Fallback: Always save converted textures in the fallback texture directory.
Show Advanced Options: Show more advanced options in the user interface.
...
- .
| Anchor | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
...
There are a number of available substitution tokens:
| token | contents |
|---|---|
node_type | the node type (PxrDiskLight, PxrTexture, etc). |
img_atlas | True if the texture is a UDIM or Mudbox texture set. |
img_name | the image name, without its file extension. |
img_ext | the image's file extension, with its leading dot. |
img_type | the image's data type: int or float |
img_depth | the image's bit depth: 8, 16, 32 |
In the example above, the rule:
...