Summary

This chapter started off with a brief discussion about what textures are and why they might be needed. To recap, if you are fine with models that have just the color info on their surface, you are done as soon as the modeling and material application process is finished. If you think you need to show distinctive qualities on your models’ surfaces, you need to utilize textures.

To that end, you discovered how a new coordinate system—one that involves mapping spatial coordinates to texture coordinates via a method called UV unwrapping—might be necessary. Once the UV unwrapping is done, you can apply and swap different textures to your 3D models since the mapping from 2D to 3D is established.

Although creating textures with image editing applications is quite possible, you also know how to create textures procedurally in Blender. This is a powerful method, especially when it comes to surfaces that are hard to UV unwrap, such as landscapes.

Last but...