ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the use of texture for representing surface detail, shadows, and reflections. While the basic ideas are simple, several practical problems complicate the use of textures. First of all, textures easily become distorted, and designing the functions that map textures onto surfaces is challenging. The use of texture mapping and animation together readily produces truly dramatic aliasing, and much of the complexity of texture mapping systems is created by the antialiasing measures that are used to tame these artifacts. The problem of defining texture coordinate functions is not new to computer graphics. Exactly the same problem is faced by cartographers when designing maps that cover large areas of the Earth's surface: the mapping from the curved globe to the flat map inevitably causes distortion of areas, angles, and/or distances that can easily make maps very misleading.