Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Summary

Texturing can be a lot of fun; it’s a very creative process and you can take it as far as you want. Applying the textures is the point in the process when you really have the opportunity to make a character realistic. If you want realism, it’s recommended that you use photos to create your textures (skin, wood, grass, sand—virtually anything) instead of painting them manually. In Jim’s case, the style is not photorealistic at all, so some basic textures defining the colors and some details are fine.

Depending on the requirements of the texture, its effects can be very different. If it’s a diffuse color texture that will be mixed with other textures to define a surface’s shine or reflectivity for example, it will only have color information. ...