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Now we're moving on to image creation controls.
When you are going to extract a texture, you must turn on the Create Texture checkbox first, before clicking the Set button to set up a file name. That is necessary so that the Save File dialog can be used, instead of Open File (since generally the file will not exist yet).
On the Save File dialog, select the type of image to be used to store the image.
Some file types, especially JPEG, are not able to store alpha channels.
After you set the file name, click Options to set any compression options for that file type.
You can then set the horizontal and vertical resolution of the image to be computed. Note that these controls have drop-downs for quick and accurate selection of standard values, but you can also enter the values directly into the edit fields.
Tip : You can enter the image size you want on the Texture Control Panel, you do not have to stick to the preconfigured drop-down values, and you can use larger values than the 4K that is the largest value in the drop-down, if the situation warrants it (a traveling shot).
Warning : as you go to generate that 32K x 16K texture, keep in mind that the amount of viable information in it will depend on what images are fed into the process; for example, you can not produce a high resolution texture from a single 720x480 input image. You will produce a high-resolution image with many blurry pixels!
With the image depth drop-down, select the desired resolution to be saved in the output file: 8-bit, 16-bit, half-float, or floating point. Which channel depths are supported will depend on the output file format, for example JPEG is only 8-bit.; there's no notification of that. You should see that in downstream packages, or you can check file sizes.
Though it is here with the format controls, the filter type drop-down controls how the internal texture processing is done, as the resolution changes from the input image resolution to the texture image resolution. The default 2-Lanczos should be used almost always; bilinear may be a little faster and less crisp, 3-Lanczos will take longer and might possibly produce slightly sharper images. 2-Mitchell (Mitchell-Netravali) is between bilinear and 2-Lanczos in sharpness.
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