Textures
FurryBall provides hardware acceleration only for 2D file textures and in some cases 2D layered textures directly. All other 2D procedural textures (for example checker, fractal etc.) are supported starting from FurryBall 3, too, but these textures must first be computed (flattened) by Maya and after that used by FurryBall. Maya needs some time for this computation and it depends on texture resolution. See section Procedural Textures for more information. Also see Materials, Lights and Hair Node sections for information about what attributes can be connected to textures. File textures and 2D procedural textures can generally be connected to ALL texture attributes supported by FurryBall.
To render scene with textures, the Textures feature has to be enabled in currently active render node (see Render Settings Node section).
To render scene also with 2D procedural textures Procedural Textures enabled, this feature has to be enabled in currently active render node (see Render Settings Node section). See Tutorial 10: Procedural Textures for more info on general procedural textures.
These image file formats are supported when loading file textures:
Image sequence can be used. Also Gain and Offset parameters in Color Balance section are fully supported.
File names for image sequence must be in specific format: name.number.ext, where name is any text (or nothing), number must be in format with same number of digits (for example: 0000 - 1890, or 00-78, ...) and ext is files extension. Important are dots before ext and number!
When file texture is loaded, it is converted to a DDS data format (if not already in DDS), compressed (if compression is enabled), pre-filtered and saved to a temporary cache directory. If a texture with the same name and path is about to be loaded anytime on the same system, FurryBall always checks its cache and uses cached version if any to minimize loading/processing time. If the original texture is modified FurryBall, detects it and creates a new cache entry.
It is recommended to use DDS file format when rendering with FurryBall, images can be converted to DDS using Adobe Photoshop with NVIDIA Photoshop plugin. It is possible to choose data format, filter type for prefiltering and other DDS parameters using the Photoshop plugin. This can save some processing time because FurryBall uses DDS image file format internally.
Textures are loaded (or generated) once they are needed and kept in GPU memory until a new scene is opened or Maya is closed. Textures usually need huge amounts of memory compared to geometry and it can be useful to release them when not needed if video/system memory is limited. To release textures use Clear Textures button in render node (see Render Settings Node section).