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title: "Best Practices - The Tray"
canonical: "https://rmanwiki-27.pixar.com/space/RU/608927745/Best%20Practices%20-%20The%20Tray"
format: markdown
---
## The Tray
The tray that the main objects rest on has a similar treatment to the wooden table.
Below are the actual textures used to create the effects on the tray.
These are square textures (1:1), and that ratio is preferred for texturing work when possible.
Note that the images displayed here are more compressed than their actual project counterparts to improve page loading.
A final normal map is added to create the illusion of surface details and shape without resorting to using displacement to actually change the shape of the tray.
### Passing maps through utilities to aid in look development.
Painting texture maps may happen where there's limited feedback as you paint them. This means you may have a texture ready to try, but you haven't decided if it applies the effect you want correctly. It may be too dark or too bright. Your roughness map may be too rough or not rough enough. Endless variations may force you to go back and forth with your chosen painting program, and that can become frustrating.
Using the IPR mode in Maya, you can pass your textures through some utility nodes and make some value adjustments directly in the render.
> ℹ️ The [pattern networks](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/REN26/19661575) can be evaluated during the render, every time it processes the texture, or you can [bake](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/RFM26/21037142) the result and improve overall efficiency for complex assets. (You might want to avoid baking things until you have final approval from the client to avoid endless trips to the render farm.) Some patterns are more expensive to evaluate than others and can begin to impact your scene render times. Baking can improve this since it's simply evaluated once as a texture and cached. You can find out more on the topic of efficiency by looking at the article on [Improving Performance](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/REN26/19661851).
> ℹ️ While [Ptex](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/REN26/19661679) can save time preparing assets for texturing, the performance is not as good as using standard textures on objects with UV's defined. This cost-benefit balance should be weighed when planning a project. If you have many objects to texture, Ptex may save your artists time overall. Otherwise, you may find better rendering efficiency and simplification with texture maps and a typical UDIM (or "tiled") UV layout.
Below, the Specular Roughness texture is changed using a [PxrColorCorrect](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/REN26/19661599) node and adjusted in Maya's IPR. Different Gamma values are used in the Color Correct section of the pattern. Since the texture is a grayscale (scalar) map, the RGB channels all have identical values. Only the Red Channel is manipulated and then connected to the Primary Specular Roughness parameter. Alternatively, you could connect the Color Correct pattern to a conversion node like the [PxrToFloat](https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/REN26/19661713) pattern, but this adds another evaluation to the node graph that's not necessary in this example.
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### Next Steps
Now we’ve worked on the tray, in the next lesson we’ll have a look at the glass milk bottle
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