Intro to Texturing

🛑⚠️🚧Content not yet finished 🚧⚠️🛑

Everything below represents notes for Sepha to finish the YouTube vid and article with.

What is a texture?

Textures as far as we're concerned are 2D images that wrap color information across the surface of our meshes, and are made of pixels.

They store their data internally in four black and white channels:

• R, G, B - The 3 primary color channels. When all three are combined, they create meaningful color information.

• A - The Alpha channel, storing visibility/transparency information

Our UV Map translates 3d space into 2d, so provided we have an Unwrap, we can now map our 2d textures onto the 3d surface of our meshes.

R, G, and B channels are "additive" - meaning they add together to form White at 1.0 (255), and black at 0.0 (0).

Texture Filetypes

There are many others, but these two are the most common:

• .JPG (JPEG)

  • Lossy Compression (some quality is thrown away when saved)

  • No Alpha support

  • Filesize: Tiny on Disk.

• .PNG (PNG)

  • Lossless compression (no quality lost when saving)

  • Alpha support

  • Filesize: Smallish on disk, can sometimes be big.

.PNG is almost universally favored over other formats due to its numerous positives, and few drawbacks. In general, you're going to stick almost always to .PNG.

These are some other common formats:

• .BMP

• .TGA

  • Comes in two common variants. "24 Bit" and "32 Bit". 24 Bit has no Alpha, 32 does.

  • Typically Large file size.

  • 32 Bit TGA's is commonly used to solve .PNG's weaknesses

• .TIF

• .EXR

  • Massive files, storing a high dynamic range.

• .PSD (Special Mention)

  • Not a "True" image format, but a container for Photoshop Doccuments

  • Widely supported though, and has some neat Unity features that make it worth using sometimes.

Compiled Formats

Every image you create for a game will be compiled into a different format in the end. A Playstation or Xbox won't render .PNGs in the final game.

Therefore, feel free to pick whichever file format works for you. The game engines will convert them into different file formats in the end regardless.

We will go into detail about this in a later chapter, just keep this in mind for now.

1. Simple Texturing

We can directly texture our objects in Blender, by painting onto the surface of our model.

This is a rather old-school method that carries with it a certain cool aesthetic. When we eventually get into Baking, we can supercharge this hand painted feel.

The Textures are separate to the Mesh.

Our textures are not "apart of" or "contained within" our mesh. They are separate, and distinct. When moving your Mesh between computers/programs, or into the game engine from Blender, your Texture also needs to be manually sent along with it.

Nowadays there are a lot of semi-automatic features that will OCCASIONALLY correctly assign a texture when sending a model from program to another. In general, you can almost never rely on these.

Get into the habbit of thinking of your textures as:

• Files that live on the disk

• That you need to move around along with your Mesh

• That you assign to Materials.

Lastly

Textures are not simply "digital photographs", they contain Data.

The Data is commonly color data in the way we as humans think about pictures, but in reality its all just data, and we can store any arbitrary information inside of them.

In the Intro to Baking chapter, we're going to talk about this data at length.

✨Homework✨

Sepha note - Give them homework here where they unwrap and texture their old dagger. that they made in the previous chapter on box modeling