Texture to buffer
Texture to buffer takes a Texture and exposes its pixel bytes through a GPU Buffer outlet. There are no user controls beyond the input connection.
The output buffer is suitable for storage-buffer or vertex-buffer consumers, but the bytes are still pixels. The process does not create position, normal or UV attributes, change the image format, or infer a mesh topology.
Workflow
- Connect the texture source to Texture.
- Inspect its dimensions and format with Texture Info from Geometry and buffer utilities.
- Connect Buffer to a compute process, or to Buffer to array if CPU-side values are needed.
- Configure the receiving process for the texture’s actual component representation and byte layout.
For example, RGBA8 pixels are four 8-bit components, not four Float32 values. Treating those bytes as floats will not normalize or convert their colors. If you use Buffers to geometry downstream, explicitly describe how the pixel records should be interpreted and how many records to draw.
Transfer and resource boundaries
The implementation uploads available texture pixel bytes into a separate GPU buffer. Do not assume this is a zero-copy alias of the original GPU image: a GPU-produced image can require readback before those bytes are available. The buffer size follows the input byte size.
This is not the direct inverse of Array to texture, whose input is a CPU float value array. For numeric value access, add Buffer to array with the correct element type. Keep processing on the GPU when CPU readback is unnecessary; see Compute Shaders and Render Pipeline.