Best way of performing algebraic operations on textures?

[georgy95]

Currently, most materials support Texture OR RGB albedo inputs. I want to change this behaviour to AND (RGB * Texture) i.e. tint this texture, for example, multiply the bitmap by [2, 2, 2] to make it brighter.

As it stands, I could edit the texture itself and load a new texture. Or convert the texture to a tensor and apply the multiplication by a 3Vector. Both of these methods seem very slow and are computed on the CPU.

What is a better way of handling this:

• Create a custom material that separates RGB and Texture types? I.e. add base_color_tint + base_color_texture parameters.
• Create a new texture plugin, which accepts scale parameter
• Current way of scaling the Tensor

[njroussel]

Hi @georgy95

The second option is the most generic one, I'd recommend that. (To be clear all 3 approaches will work just fine and will have similar performance).
We will "soon" be working on adding some basic arithmetic plugins for textures. This will mostly be used for material conversions from Blender into Mitsuba. You can expect a similar set of shading nodes.

[georgy95]

Thank you. And awesome to hear!!