You can add a 2D image as a texture to an appearance. When you apply an appearance with textures to a part in a model, the textures are mapped on the part according to the texture properties.
To add and edit textures in appearances:
-
In the Palette, on the Appearances
tab, select an appearance in the Appearance tree.
-
On the Texture subtab, click the
Color, Specular,
Alpha, or Bump channel.
For a 2D image, a channel is a sub-image composed only of
the values for a single component of a given pixel. A grayscale image has
one color channel, an RGB image has three, and a CMYK image has four. When
applied to appearances, the term refers to one particular subset of the
properties which determine the way in which a surface reacts to light,
including color, reflectivity, transparency, diffusion, specularity, and
bump.
Alternatively, you can drag a 2D image from your desktop,
email, or similar source, to the part in a model in the project. Then you
can select which channel to apply the texture to. With
Color textures, non-transparent appearances can
use a 2D texture instead of a base color. However, some types of
appearances, such as Emissive, multiply the base
color by the Color texture RGB values. If you add an
Alpha texture with transparency, only the
transparency channel in the Color texture is
used.
- In the dialog box, browse to select a texture.
You can select any 2D image in the following formats:
- .JPEG
-
.GIF
-
.TIFF
-
.BMP (Bitmaps)
-
.TGA (Targa)
If the texture contains transparency, you must use the
.PNG or .TIFF format which
supports an alpha channel. The alpha channel is the top byte of a 32-bit
pixel that is used for data other than color. The alpha channel commonly
holds mask data so an image can be separated from its background for use in
compositing.
- To see the texture's parameters, do one of the following:
- In the Appearance tree, select the appearance icon.
- Click
and select a part to which the appearance
has been applied.