Tiling 1 : Standard Tiles
A tiling texture is a texture that is repeated many times over a surface. The most common practice when tiling textures is probably creating an image file with its top pixels made to match the bottom pixels and the sides made to match each other in the same way. Sometimes this is called XY-tiling since […]
Fresnel Fun
I wrote about the fresnel effect earlier, in the post Interaction of Light and Materials. Here is a simple experiment to see this effect on a not very glossy surface. Grab a sheet of printer paper or note paper, not the photo kind with a glossy coating, and look at it like this to see […]
Normals and Normal Map Theory
Normals are often talked about in terms of vertex normals, face normals and normal maps. Vertex normals and face normals concern the perceived curvature and facing angle of a modeled surface, let us call it surface shading, without any normal maps applied. Normal maps are image files that come in two variants: Object space normal […]
Interaction of Light and Materials
The look of a material depends on what happens to light hitting that material. How much is reflected to our eyes and in what fashion. How this differs over wavelengths of color and over the angle at which we see the surface reflecting light.
Additive and Subtractive Color
White light can be thought of as a combination of wavelengths, containing all of the colors in the visible spectrum. Red light has long waves compared to blue light in the other end of the spectrum. When light interacts with a material, the light is partially absorbed by that material. If some wavelengths of light […]
Value References
When texturing a scene, I find it useful to look at images taken under ambient lighting conditions. Use the Blur / Average filter on selected parts of the image in Photoshop to get some basic albedo colors to start out with. Just keep in mind that this works best for diffuse materials, and do not […]