Helpdesk Portal

The texture feature allows to build of different types of textures for a model. The following types of textures are available in Agisoft Metashape:

• Diffuse map
• Occlusion map
• Normal map
• Displacement map
• Set the type of texture 

Diffuse map

The basic texture stores the colors of the model surface. Built from the photos projected onto geometry or from another diffuse map of another model (source: images or mesh model).

Occlusion map

Usually, this type of texture is also called - Ambient Occlusion map (AO map). In computer graphics, ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. AO map - black and white texture, the brighter it is - the more external light gets to this point (taking into account the surrounding geometry), the darker - the less external light falls on this point (i.e. the more this point is obscured around by the different geometry). Built on geometry (source: mesh model).  For example in a "fold" on the relief, in a cave, in a well - the AO map will be much darker because ambient light gets there poorly - only at a certain angle. 

Normal map

Each point stores the surface normal, in other words, a description of how the geometry is curved. Usually, this is encoded with triangles, but it takes a lot of them and it is many megabytes and such encoding in the form of a texture is compact and allows you to create the illusion of detailed geometry. A normal map is built using the original detailed geometry consisting of a bunch of honest triangles. 

You can find an example of using Normal map in our article - Texture maps - Normal map generation.  

Displacement map

Displacement map is a black-and-white texture where each pixel has a value from 0 to 255. These values are used to determine the height of each point on the surface of the object.

Set the type of texture 

You can set the type of texture at the stage of its construction, for this to do this steps: 

1. Select Build Texture... command from the Workflow menu (Workflow > Build Texture...). 

2. Select the texture type and the desired texture generation parameters in the Build Texture dialog box. 

3. Click OK button when done. 

4. The progress dialog box will appear displaying the current processing status. To cancel processing click Cancel button. 

5. To display the texture of the selected type, click the Model Textured button on the Toolbar and select the type.