Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 30

Procedural Textures

Image courtesy of Riley Perry

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand the advantages and disadvantages of procedural textures;
• know how to implement 2D and 3D checker textures;
• know how to transform textures;
• know how to attach textures to transformed objects.

30.1 Introduction

Texture mapping and proceduralism are the two major texturing techniques used in computer graphics. Procedural textures use code to generate colors, instead of extracting them from images. A procedural texture’s get_color function uses the coordinates of a hit point and algorithms to generate the color. This approach ...