Using Textures

A texture is an image file used to help define the appearance of an object.

You can apply one or more textures to a material, then apply the material to an object in the scene.

Spark AR Studio supports PNG and JPG texture files. Image files can be a maximum of 1024x1024 pixels in size.

Importing Textures

To add a texture to your project:

1. Click + in the Assets panel.
2. Select Import from Computer.
3. Choose the texture.

Textures are listed in the Assets panel.

You can also apply textures directly to materials in the Inspector panel, without importing them into the project first.

Applying Textures to Materials

To apply a texture to a material:

1. Select the material in the Assets panel.
2. Select a dropdown next to Texture in the Inspector tab.
3. Select the texture you want to apply.

Where to apply the texture depends on the shader you're using and the texture you're applying. Find out more about materials and shader types in Spark AR Studio.

You can also use visual shaders to apply textures to materials in the Patch Editor - find out more.

Textures - Properties

When you select a texture in the Assets panel, you'll see its properties in the Inspector tab.

Which properties you'll be able to change will depend on the type of texture you're using.

File, File Size and Dimensions

The file, file size and dimensions of the texture.

Alpha Channel

Whether the texture has an alpha channel or not.

Premultiply

Check this box to integrate transparency information.

Color Encoding

Choose whether colors are interpreted as Linear or sRGB.

Sampling

Adjust Filtering to address size mismatch between the actual image data, and its footprint on the screen as it's rendered.

Filtering can help correct errors in textures, particularly in scenes where part of a detailed texture is placed further away from the viewer.

The higher the filtering, the greater the impact on the performance of your effect.

None

Choosing None will apply nearest neighbor interpolation. This will usually result in pixelated textures.

Low

Low filtering will apply Bilinear interpolation.

Medium (MIP)

Apply a medium level of filtering, using Mipmapping. You may still see abrupt changes in quality, the further the texture is from the camera.

High (Trilinear)

Apply the highest level of filtering. Abrupt changes you might see when using Medium filtering shouldn't be noticeable anymore.

Example

We've applied a texture that looks like a grid to a plane. The plane is tilted away from the camera.

Below, the image on the left shows how the texture would look on the device with Low sampling. In the middle we've selected Medium and the final image has High sampling:

Texture Sizes

Calculate the size of the texture across different devices.

Compression

Experiment with different compression settings. Find out more about compressing textures.

Tiling mode

Use U Tiling mode to repeat, clamp or mirror image contents along its horizontal axis.

User V Tiling Mode to repeat, clamp or mirror image contents along its vertical axis.

Used By

Any materials using the texture.

Compression Preview

Preview compression on the texture.

Texture Compression

In PVR and ETC compression schemes, exported images are resized to a square with edge length equal to the smallest power of 2 larger than the larger dimension of the texture. For example:

• A texture of size 1024x1024 or 512x512 will remain unchanged.
• A texture of size 512x400 will become 512x512.
• A 400x400 texture will become 512x512. The image is scaled up, but the extra pixels don't add any extra detail. This could be an opportunity to either save space and scale the image down to 256x256 or to improve quality without adding to the export size, by scaling the original image up to 512x512.