Surfacing - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 173

mapped. That leaves Generated mapping
as the almost exclusive province of pro-
cedural textures.
So, if your object is “solid,” and you're
planning to use a procedural texture to
simulate it, choose Generated from the
Coordinates control on the Mapping
panel. For now, you can ignore both the
Projection and x , y , and z controls.
The Offset and Size controls, however,
determine the scale and location of your
object's texture space, and are very
important. Figure 7.8 shows a single
channel of a procedural texture that uses
the Wood style. As a default, textures are
centered, meaning that the center of the
concentric rings will be in the center of
your object. What if you want a different
“slice” of the texture? The Offset values
move the object's texture space, chang-
ing the portion of the texture that you
see. By adjusting the offset x , y , and z
values, you can cause your wooden cube
to use only the portion indicated in the
figure.
The Size controls will seem backwards at
first. Raise the size values over 1.0, and
the texture will appear to shrink on your
object. Lower the value between and 1.0
and 0.0, and the texture will appear
larger. Negative values will mirror the
texture along that axis (e.g., size y = −1
will flip the texture along the y axis).
The reason for the apparent opposition
to reality is that the Size controls affect
not the texture, but the object's texture
space . The texture space is the “size”
that Blender considers an object for tex-
turing purposes. So, if you have a cube Figure 7.8 Finding the right part of a texture with Offset.