Building a World - Game Development with Three.js - page 19

All of these material constructors except MeshFaceMaterial take a map of options as
their only parameter. We've already encountered three options from our icosahedron
example: color , wireframe , and wireframeLinewidth . Additionally, setting the
transparency option to true allows use of the opacity option, a value between
zero and one indicating how see-through the material should be (zero is invisible,
one is opaque). For materials that don't use images, the other option that may be
relevant is shading , which has a value of either THREE.SmoothShading or THREE.
FlatShading indicating whether to blend colors of each face together, as shown in
the next screenshot:
Left, THREE.MeshNormalMaterial({shading: THREE.FlatShading}); Right, THREE.
MeshNormalMaterial({shading: THREE.SmoothShading});
There are several other properties, the most important of which is also the most
useful: map . This defines the texture used to wrap over the geometry. Usually, using
this property looks like the following code snippet:
var image = THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture('image.jpg');
new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({map: image});