Adding Textures

Generally speaking, a texture is a kind of image that you stretch or tile over the surface of your object to give it more detail without adding more geometry. Not only can textures influence the color of your object, but they can also allow you to make additional adjustments, such as stipulating the specularity of some specific parts of the model. For example, on a human face, skin tends to be shinier across the nose and forehead, and a reduced specularity exists around the eyes. With textures, you can control these sorts of things.

You can add and edit textures to a material in Texture Properties, as shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1: The Texture Properties.

Like Material Properties, Texture Properties has a Preview panel that displays the texture as you work on it. By default, the Preview panel is hidden because the initial texture type is None. You can change this type in the Context panel with the Type drop-down menu. The list box at the top of the Context panel is similar to the list box in Material Properties. With these Texture slots, you can control the textures applied to your material (which, in turn, is applied to your object). However, unlike the list box in Material Properties, you can't arbitrarily add and remove texture slots. You have exactly 18 slots to work with. Left-click any texture slot in the list to choose that slot as the one you want to work on. The texture slots that are populated with a texture display the name of that texture next to its icon. You can customize the name of the texture by left-clicking the texture datablock name field below the list box. This field is part of a set of datablock controls just like the ones used in Material Properties or Object Properties (see Chapter 7).

When you pick a specific texture type (other than None) by clicking the Type drop-down menu, a Preview panel appears in Texture Properties. By default, the Preview panel has a window that displays your current texture. However, if you left-click the Material button beneath the preview window, it's updated with the same preview panel you see in Material Properties. With this preview type, you can actively see how your texture is mapped to an object without the hassle of bouncing between Material Properties and Texture Properties. If you left-click the Both button, the preview splits to display the material preview on the left and the texture preview on the right. Figure 8-2 shows the three different views of the Preview panel.

Figure 8-2: From left to right, the Preview panel in Texture Properties allows you to preview your texture, see how your texture is applied in your material, and see a split view of both.