3dCMS Knowledge Base
Open the editor
Materials & Textures

Textures & PBR packs

How images become materials, which formats are supported, and how 3dCMS streams textures so big scenes stay light on memory.

Open in the interactive manual →

The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.


A texture is an image used as a material channel — a wood photo for color, a normal map for surface detail, a packed map for roughness/metal. They come into the graph through Raster Map and Channel Splitter nodes.

Adding a texture

Each texture field has a URL box, a Library button (browse built-in textures and your own uploads), and an Upload… button. Click an image in the Asset Library and 3dCMS even creates a textured plane for it automatically.

Supported formats

WhereFormats
Built-in texturesPNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF
Uploaded imagesPNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, SVG, plus HDR / EXR (as HDRIs)
KTX2 / Basis textures aren't supported (yet) If you import a model whose textures are KTX2/Basis-compressed, 3dCMS will tell you to re-export the GLB with standard PNG/JPEG textures.

Texture streaming

Image-heavy scenes — especially imported websites — could exhaust a phone's GPU memory if every picture loaded at once. 3dCMS streams them intelligently:

  • Lazy by distance: a texture only loads when the camera comes near it; until then a placeholder holds its place.
  • Proxied & sized: external images load through a CORS-safe proxy and are requested no larger than the device can use.
  • Bounded residency: once too many textures are in memory, the farthest ones are released and re-stream if you return.

You can cap how many image textures stay resident in Settings ▸ Viewport Feel — a useful knob for big mobile scenes.

Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email buck.rackley@gmail.com.