Surfacing - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 170

material with the texture incorporated, or both side by side. As I usually use a materials window to the
left of my texturing window, I can already see the material preview there. These different preview styles
are selected with the buttons below the preview.
Below the Preview panel is a panel named with the texture type. In the case of this example, it is called
“stucci.” This panel holds the controls that are specific to that texture type. Getting just the right settings
in this panel is a combination of knowing what you are shooting for, and trial and error. The different
button options present for the texture types (Plastic/Wall In/Wall Out and Soft/Hard for stucci) obey one
rule: If it looks like what you want, it's what you want. There are no hard-and-fast guides about what
option you should use where or when. It's completely subjective, and one artist might be able to use Wall
In/Hard to get a believable wall texture, while another will use Wall Out/Soft and achieve an equally
believable one.
Below the style-specific options is often a Noise Basis selector. Blender has ten different kinds of “noise,”
which just refers to different mathematical models for generating semi-random patterning. The default is
always Blender Original, but it's worth
paging through each of them until you
get a feel for what they look like.
Blender Original and the two Perlin
variations create similar globby noises
that when set to “hard” noise almost
look like the cross section of an ant hill.
The Voronoi textures take a seemingly
cellular approach, creating everything
from haphazard honeycombs to patterns
that resemble a cracked desert floor.
Cell Noise creates a grid, and is superb
for adding visual interest to mechanical
and manufactured surfaces. Check the
Web Bucket ( noise_texture_types.mpeg )
for a run through of all the different
texture types, regardless of their actual
usefulness.
The last two common controls for pro-
cedural textures are Size and Turbu-
lence . The Size property brings us to
one of the most important aspects of
achieving believability in your scenes:
scale. As long as your models are fairly
accurate, the only thing you need to
worry about is texture scaling. Consider
Figure 7.6 . It shows a chair sitting on Figure 7.6 An oddly carpeted loor.