The Texture types allow for creating very flexible materials.
These are used to create patterns that can be used alone or in combination with the Mapping and Colour textures to create memory efficient, procedural textures that, in turn, can be used to create textures, bump maps and other advanced materials with minimal impact to GPUThe GPU is responsible for displaying graphical elements on a computer display. The GPU plays a key role in the Octane rendering process as the CUDA cores are utilized during the rendering process. memory.
It is therefore advantageous to explore creating materials using these textures before resorting to image based textures.
When to use Floatimage versus Image Data Type?
There are some parameters where full colour data is not used (or useful). If a full colour image is loaded, it can take much more memory in the GPU than a grey scale image, even though the user only really wants the grey scale data. Since memory management is very critical for GPU rendering, the Floatimage type allows a user to load a full colour texture but it will be interpreted as a grey scale image and therefore use less video ram. If the full colour data is needed then use the Image data type (normal maps, diffuse maps).