Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 192

Mapping Coordinates
To apply the texture to the mesh properly, I needed
to tell the material to use the UV coordinates that I
created in Chapter 8.
To do so, I could set the Coordinates option in
the Mapping panel to UV. There are several other
choices here, though, that are worth discussing. For
example, the Generated option will create a proce-
dural projection using the Projection setting below,
which can be useful for applying seamless textures
without having to unwrap an object. Generated
coordinates project the surface of the object onto
an imaginary shape—a plane, a cube, a sphere, or
a cylinder—and use this projection to apply the
texture. The result is shown in Figure 12-13.
We'll use some of the other options, such as
strand coordinates, later in this chapter. We've
already seen normal coordinates in action, when
applying MatCap images for use with GLSL shading.

Influence
The Influence panel of the Materials tab is where
we set which properties of the material our texture
will affect. The panel lists all the material proper-
ties that textures can be used to control, such as
normals; hardness; alpha transparency; and diffuse,
specular, and mirror colors and intensities. For our
diffuse texture, we'll stick with the default of Color,
under the diffuse properties, which sets the diffuse
color of the surface using the texture's RGB values
(see Figure 12-14). I set the Blend mode for this tex-
ture to Mix, meaning it will replace the default dif-
fuse color specified in the Material settings.
You can also use only the black-and-white value
of a texture and ignore its color information by
checking the RGB to Intensity option. This lets you
choose a specific color to multiply this value within
the color picker below it, for use with properties
that still need colors. The Negative option inverts
the texture before applying it to the model. The
Stencil option can be particularly useful for com-
bining procedural textures because it makes the
texture act as a mask for the texture slots below:
White areas of the texture will allow subsequent
textures to be applied, while black areas will show
only textures higher up in the texture slot stack.

Figure 12-13: Blender's generated coordinates project an arbi-
trary shape onto your object to create a mapping for textures.
Top to bottom: flat, cube, tube, and sphere projections. Here,
cube and sphere do a good job because the shape of the
skull is largely similar to these shapes.

Further Textures
Now, I'll continue to apply textures to my mate-
rial. First, we'll look at the specular and hardness
textures that I created in Chapter 11. To add the