Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Quickie Texture
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[edit] Intro
Textures are laid on top of materials to give them complicated colours and other effects. An object is covered with a material, which might contain several textures: An image texture of stone, a texture to make the stone look bumpy, and a texture to make the stone deform in different ways. This tutorial uses the file from the previous tutorial. If you didn't do it before, go back and do it now.
[edit] Adding a texture
Select the object to be textured. Add a Material to it if it hasn't got one already. Select the Textures tab with the spotty square icon (or by pressing F6). Click Add New (if the default texture 'None' is not present). Select the texture type from the drop-down list. You can also change the texture's name (It will be something like Tex.001) by clicking on the name box.
[edit] Adding a cloud texture
Add a new Cloud texture (select Clouds from the texture type drop-down list). A preview appears, as well as some parameters to experiment with.
Head back to the Materials tab (Click the red sphere or press F5) and a coloured preview of the texture appears. It is purple! All new textures default to this colour. On the right hand side there are three tabs: Texture, Map Input, and Map To. Select the Map To tab. The RGB (Red, Green, Blue) sliders here adjust the colour of the texture. Some areas are transparent and show the material underneath. This allows you to layer textures. Make the colour black. Render the object (F12) to see the effect:
Next we will add a stucci texture to make our clouds look bumpy.
[edit] Adding a Stucci texture
Go back to the textures tab (F6) and select the next texture channel (one of the blank buttons under 'Tex'). Add a new texture here and set the type to Stucci. Back to the Material (F5), and click the "Map To" tab. Turn Col off and Nor on. Col means the texture affects the colour. Nor means it affects the rendered normal, or the angle the renderer treats the surface as - creating fake shadows on the surface. Play with the Nor slider, but leave it on about 4. Go back to the texture tab and make the cloud texture active. Now click the Map Input tab - we are going to change the size of the cloud texture. Set SizeX to 0.2 (stretching the texture five times on the x-axis) and SizeY to 10 (squishing the texture 10 times in the Y-axis). Render! The object looks like it has grooves.
(Noob note: If you don't see the grooves, click the Texture tab and click on NewCloudTextur to make it active. Then try again)
[edit] Adding an image texture
Any JPG will do for this bit, but if you can't decide, find a nice picture of wood you'd like to use as a texture on the web. Using the Image Search feature of a search engine is an easy way. Remove the two old textures (on the Textures tab, select the old ones and click the little X next to their name) and add a new Image texture. Still in Textures, select image from the texture type drop down menu, click Load Image, and choose your image. Hit F12 to render.
Back to the Map Input tab (Materials, F5), try the effects of Flat, Cube, Tube and Sphere, and the XYZ buttons below. Also remember you can change the size of your image using the Size parameters (SizeX etc.)
User Request: How do I place fine details in my image (such as logos on a wall) in the right place?
In "Map input" tab you can see 3 sliders : ofs (offset) X, Y and Z. By adjusting them you can move the image around (i.e. place the logo where you want it.
[edit] Further Reading
Textures are a very powerful tool, and layering them can create all sorts of interesting effects. You can use Disp to actually displace the vertices of your object based on the texture (best used with a high vertex count or Subsurf) and do all sorts of other tricks. The Nor feature is very good for making objects look more realistic without greatly increasing the render time.
