What's New in Director 8.5 > Working with Models and Model Resources > Textures |  |

Textures

Each shader can have textures applied to it. Textures are 2D images drawn on the surface of a model. The appearance of the model's surface is the combined effect of the shader and textures applied to it. If you do not specify a texture, a default red-and-white bitmap is used.

The pixel height and width of the 2D images you use as textures should be powers of 2 (that is, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on). All the textures used in a 3D scene must be able to fit in the computer's video RAM at the same time. If not, Director switches to software rendering, which slows performance.

Be aware of the limitations of your video RAM and that of your intended audience. Some video cards have as little as 4 megabytes of video RAM. Carefully budget your total texture size when designing your 3D world.