Blender For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8

Giving Models Texture

In This Chapter

• Working with textures
• Creating procedural textures
• Thinking about texture mapping

If you want a more controlled way of adjusting the look of your object than what's described in Chapter 7, then using material settings alone won't get you there. You can use Vertex Paint (V), but if you're working on a model that you intend to animate, Vertex Paint can cause you to have many extraneous vertices just for color. Those vertices end up slowing down the processes of rigging, animating, and even rendering. Also, you may want to have material changes that are independent of the topology and edge flow of your mesh.

For those sorts of scenarios, you're going to want to use textures, which is the focus of this chapter. One thing to note is that, like working with materials (see Chapter 7), there are differences in how you add textures, depending on whether you're rendering with the Blender Internal (BI) or Cycles render engine. As you work through this chapter, I point out where the differences are.

Adding Textures

Generally speaking, a texture is a kind of image that you stretch or tile over the surface of your object to give it more detail without adding more geometry. Not only can textures influence the color of your object, but they can also allow you to make additional adjustments, such as stipulating the shininess of some specific parts of the model. For example, on a human face, skin tends to be shinier across the nose and forehead, ...