OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Texture Mapping

In the physical world, colors within your field of view can change rapidly. Odds are you’re reading this book inside of a building.¹ Look at the walls, ceiling, floors, and objects in the room. Unless you’ve furnished your home entirely at Ikea, it’s likely some surface in the room will have detail where the colors change rapidly across a small area. Capturing color changes with that amount of detail is both toilsome and data-intensive (effectively, you need to specify a triangle for each region of linear color change). It would be much simpler to be able to use a picture and “glue” it onto the surface like wallpaper. Enter texture mapping. This technique allows you to look up values, like colors, from a shader in a special type ...