Texture Mapping

What is texture mapping?

Texture mapping is a method of creating realism by drawing natural textures onto artificial objects such as three-dimensional polygons. Not surprisingly, the results achieved look very remarkable and run comparatively fast. As an example, consider a lawn with many blades of grass. Either each blade could be drawn separately, using up a fair amount of memory and processor time, or a texture of a small piece of a lawn could be drawn repeatedly over the area. The time savings are substantial enough to allow fast-paced video games such as Doom and Quake to run on ordinary PCs instead of requiring supercomputers.

Are there any drawbacks?

Yes, there are some, but these are pretty well outweighed by the many advantages. The major drawback is image quality. In the lawn example, the texture mapping may be faster, but the image will not look nearly as nice as if each blade of grass had been individually rendered. For high quality images, ray-tracing is usually used. As stated in the tutorial, ray-tracing gives totally accurate pictures because it makes use of the laws of optics to obtain the result. For video games, though, texture mapping is a great solution, because images usually aren't on the screen for long enough to matter. Plus, isn't 20 frames a second better than twenty minutes a frame?

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