Working with Textures and Materials - Mastering Blender - page 45

pattern will affect the material. In many cases, the formula for the procedural texture's pattern in fact results in
a three-dimensional pattern, and that pattern's cross-section at the plane where it intersects the mesh surface is
treated as its 2D manifestation. Blender's clouds texture is a good example of this.
Image-based textures use a 2D image such as a photograph, a hand-drawn image, or an image generated in
some other way. With both procedural and image textures, a mapping is a correspondence between 2D points
ontheimageandpointsonthe2Dsurfaceofthetexturedmesh.Thereareseveralsetwaystomaparectangular
image to a 3D surface. In Blender, the built-in mappings are a plane, a cube, a tube, and a sphere, as shown in
Figure 2-1 . Note that the image texture and the mesh are the same in all four cases. The only difference is the
mapping—that istosay,thewaythatthe2Dcoordinates ofthetexturearetranslated ontothe2Dcoordinates of
the surface of the mesh.