Threejs Textures

Three.js Textures

Use this skill for texture assets, UV behavior, color/data interpretation, environment maps, and GPU texture memory. Route asset transport/decoder setup to threejs-loaders, PBR material semantics to threejs-materials, and direct lighting decisions to threejs-lighting.

When to use this skill

• Load and configure base-color, normal, roughness, metalness, AO, emissive, or alpha maps
• Fix color mismatch, blurry/distant images, seams, bad repeats, incorrect UVs, or missing AO
• Use HDR/cubemap environments, canvas/video/data textures, or render targets
• Reduce texture memory, resolution, sampling, or duplicated GPU allocations

Instructions

Step 1: Classify every texture by meaning

1. Identify whether the texture stores visible color or non-color data.
2. Use the renderer/version's documented color-space settings for visible color textures; do not apply display color treatment to normal, roughness, metalness, depth, or data maps.
3. Confirm the mesh has the UV channel the material map expects. Ambient occlusion often needs a second UV set depending on the material and asset pipeline.

const baseColor = await new THREE.TextureLoader().loadAsync("/textures/albedo.jpg");
baseColor.colorSpace = THREE.SRGBColorSpace;
baseColor.wrapS = THREE.RepeatWrapping;
baseColor.wrapT = THREE.RepeatWrapping;
baseColor.repeat.set(2, 2);

Step 2: Choose sampling and wrapping from visual evidence

Do not set maximum anisotropy globally by habit. Query hardware capability and use a quality tier based on actual visual value.

Step 3: Handle environment and render textures as GPU resources

An HDR/equirectangular texture generally requires the renderer-version-appropriate preprocessing path before use as a PBR environment. Set scene.environment and scene.background separately according to the intended effect. A render target's texture is produced by a render pass and must be resized/disposed with that pass.

Step 4: Budget memory and ownership

Texture memory scales with dimensions, mip levels, format, and copies—not only file size. Reuse immutable texture instances, avoid loading the same URL through multiple owners, and release feature-owned textures/render targets when their last user unmounts.

function disposeTexture(texture) {
  texture?.dispose();
}

Do not dispose a texture held by another material or shared asset cache.

Step 5: Verify visual correctness and lifecycle

• Test base-color, normal, roughness, metalness, AO, and emissive maps under representative lights and color management.
• Inspect UV seams and repeat orientation on the actual mesh.
• Test the target device/profile for memory pressure and frame-time behavior.
• Resize render targets, stop/release video resources, and dispose feature-owned GPU textures.

Examples

PBR texture set

Wire each map to its semantic material property, set color space only for visible color maps, and validate the asset's normal-map convention. A flat or inverted normal look is usually map convention, tangent/UV, or color-data handling—not a roughness issue.

Dynamic video surface

Create VideoTexture from an explicitly owned video element, handle play/pause/error and cross-origin setup, and dispose the texture plus media resource according to the UI lifecycle.

Best practices

1. Distinguish display color from numeric data before setting color space.
2. Keep UV channel expectations explicit in the asset pipeline.
3. Use texture dimensions and compression appropriate to the device budget.
4. Reuse shared textures and dispose only when their final consumer is gone.
5. Treat render targets and video/canvas textures as active lifecycle resources.

References

• Three.js Textures source coverage
• Texture documentation
• Three.js manual: textures