The following list will help you optimize your scene's textures, as well as troubleshoot common problems.
Keep in mind that speed optimizations usually sacrifice quality and that quality optimizations usually decrease speed.
When using a sequence texture, it is important to make certain that the texture is using the same frame rate as the scene. If they are mismatched, the textures will not be recognized at the proper frame and the "no icon" texture will be used by default.
For information about duplicating objects with relations such as texture supports, see Duplicating Objects with Relationships [Scene Elements].
Rendering can be slowed by the amount of textures in a scene. Each 2D texture file must be loaded into memory, resulting in memory swapping (transferring data between RAM and disk). Large image files used as textures require more memory than small files and lots of different textures in the same frame require memory for each one.
You can sometimes reduce the size of texture files for objects that are far from the camera without losing image quality. You can also use memory-mapped textures when working with large texture files. For more information, see Using Memory-Mapped Textures.
The following is a list of common problems and their solutions:
If you see your texture applied to your object but it doesn't seem as though its placed as it should be, it is possible that
you did not define a texture projection for the texture. Open the texture shader property editor (Modify 
Texture) and define a texture projection by clicking the New button.
If you've applied a texture to your object and opened a render region only to see the infamous color bar no_icon.pic, it probably means that the path specified for the desired texture is no longer valid (possibly due to moved files). You
can check the path by opening the Image clip property editor (Modify Texture (name of image clip)) and selecting the page named for the image source. Check that the file path is still valid.
This can happen if the size of the object is much larger than the portion of the object seen by the camera. This is easily remedied by deactivating the Scanline option in the mental ray renderer options — see mental ray Render Options Property Editor [Properties Reference].
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
