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

Basic Texture Types

OpenGL supports many types of texture object of varying dimensionalities and layout. Each texture object represents a set of images that make up the complete texture. Each image is a 1D, 2D, or 3D array of texels and many images may be “stacked” one on top of another to form what is known as a mipmap pyramid. More information about mipmaps, how they affect texturing, and how to create them is covered in “Using and Generating Mipmaps” on Page 333. Furthermore, textures may contain arrays of 1D or 2D slices—such textures are known as array textures, and each element of the array is known as a slice. A cube map is a special case of an array texture that has a multiple of six slices. A single cube-map texture has exactly six ...