Texturing Fundamentals

In my instroduction to SkyCop, I briefly mentioned textures without describing what they are or how to use them in game development. I fear I may still not be capable of providing a full explanation, but here is what I know so far.

The tricky part of defining the word "texture" is that it can be both a noun AND a verb. That is, you use a texture file (like the image at left) to texture an object. The process of texturing can be thought of as clothing an object. No object in a Direct3D game is particularly interesting without some color or texture applied to it, and textures are the most common means of adding realism to our favorite games.

To understand how a 3D object is textured, consider the SkyCop ship below. Every Direct3D object starts as a wireframe model having a certain number of vertices. Each vertex (think point) consists of a position (x, y, z) value and a texture coordinate (u, v) value. The texture coordinate points to a position in the texture file; the point referenced in the texture file is called a texel (short for texture element). Direct3D is able to wrap the texture onto the object by using a universal address scheme for texture coordinates; the values range from 0.0 to 1.0 inclusive, both horizontally and vertically. As you can see in the image above, the top-left texel is represented by texture coordinate (0.0, 0.0) and extends to the bottom-right texel at coordinate (1.0, 1.0).

So to map the tip of the SkyCop ship with the green tip in the image, we tell Direct3D to map the vertex at the tip of the ship with horizontal u = 0.5 and vertical v = 0.0. Similarly, we map the left and right wing tips with (0.0, 0.5) and (1.0, 0.5) respectively. Are you starting to see how the texture is wrapped onto the wireframe model?

I was planning to describe the SkyCop background texturing method, but this post is already getting lengthy and I think I have more to learn on environment mapping to get it done "the right way" first. Note that this post barely touched the basics of texture-mapping. There's a lot more to learn about how textures can be used to create cool effects, and this will likely be the focus of upcoming posts.