file

If you want to use a numbered sequence of image files in your texture (i.e., animate your texture, set this to the name of the first image in the sequence.

Keyframe this attribute when you want to use a sequence of files as a file texture. (See notes in the description section above.)

• You are using a sequence of frames for the file textures. (See the Use Frame Extension attribute above).
• You are using Harware texturing in the 3d view.
• You need to "scrub" along the time line, and see the the animated texture update as you do so.

When Use Hardware Texture Cycling is turned on, you are forcing Maya to load all (or a subset of) the texture file sequence into memory. This uses up memory, but significantly improves the update speed. Use the attributes below to indicate which frames you want loaded in. If you do not load them all in, at playback time Maya will use the closest frame available.

The Hardware Texture Cycling attributes have no effect on the look of your final rendered image. They are only used to speed up what you see interactively.

During playback or scrubbing, the system will use whichever loaded frame is the closest to what is needed.

No Filter means just that. No filter is applied to the file texture. This is the fastest in terms of rendering, but will usually produce substandard results. Using this will probably result in aliasing artifacts (jaggies).

Mip Map filtering is the best choice for all-round general use. Its cost is negligible compared to the other filter types, and it generally does a good job. Internally, the renderer stores a 'pyramid' of versions of the texture, each a different resolutions, and as it renders it chooses the best ones for calculation.

Box filtering works by placing a 'box' over the the area of the texture map to be sampled, and averaging out all the samples within the box. Do not use this filter type if the file texture is to be used as a 2d projection or bump map, as it will not work properly.

Quadratic and Quartic filters give a somewhat better quality of filtering. Like the Box filter, they sample an area of the texture, but they give more weight to samples closer to the center of the area.

These filters approximate the quality of Gaussian, but are optimized to be faster. However, if you use these filter types, textures may "swim" or appear blurry. Do not use these filter type if the file texture is to be used as a 2d projection or bump map, as they will not work properly.

Gaussian filtering is slower, but gives the best quality. Use this for high-quality rendering with very sharp results.