Computer Graphics from Scratch

14TEXTURES

Our rasterizer can render objects like cubes or spheres. But we usually don’t want to render abstract geometric objects like cubes and spheres; instead, we want to render real-world objects, like crates and planets or dice and marbles. In this chapter, we’ll look at how we can add visual detail to the surface of our objects by using textures.

Painting a Crate

Let’s say we want our scene to have a wooden crate. How do we turn a cube into a wooden crate? One option is to add a lot of triangles to replicate the grain of the wood, the heads of the nails, and so on. This would work, but it would add a lot of geometric complexity to the scene, ...