ABSTRACT
From their first appearance as colour maps, there has been a steady evolution in the disparate uses to which texture maps can be put. The early stages of this evolution saw the development of bump mapping and environment mapping. Later, we have the use of texture maps to cache precalculated lighting in games, and later still, their usage in GPGPU to store the intermediate results of, say, iterative calculations. In all of these applications, the underlying motivation of their usage is to achieve an effect or make a calculation in a way that is straightforward to implement and economical.
