Introduction to Computer Graphics

Chapter 7

Texturing

Texture mapping is by far the most used technique to make 3D scenes look real. In very simple terms, it consists of applying a 2D image to the 3D geometry as you would do with a sticker on a car. In this chapter we will show how this operation is done in the virtual world where the sticker is a raster image and the car is a polygon mesh.

7.1 Introduction: Do We Need Texture Mapping?

Suppose we want to model a checkerboard. With texture mapping we can make a box with six quads and then stick an image with the black and white pattern on the top (Figure 7.1, Right). However, we could obtain the same result even without texture mapping: we could make a mesh with 5 polygons for the base and the sides, and then 64 black and white ...