What textures are and how they differ from materials

Textures and materials are not the same.

Although many people mistakenly use them interchangeably to refer to what is wrapped around a model.

It is important to understand the difference between the two because, for example, you may have used several materials and only one texture to create a 3D model.

Textures are regular images that are applied to 3D objects. Any JPEG or PNG file can be used as a texture.

Most artists create their own textures or find ready-made high-resolution images on the Internet.

By the way! On our site you can download a huge collection of PBR textures and materials for 3D modeling, texturing and game development in 3ds Max, Blender, Arnold, Vray, Corona, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, Unity and UE.

As for using and creating textures, for example, a detailed photo of a wooden wall can be used as an object texture. As a result, the model (or part of it) will look like it is made of wood. To create a similar texture, you can take a photo of any other covering (not necessarily a wall, this is just an example) made of wood and use it to cover the desired object. But this is not the only option, you can also draw the surface texture by hand - to give it a more stylized look.

Multiple textures are often used to create an object. For example, when developing video games, the landscape often requires textures of grass, road, rocks, etc. On our site you can also find ready-made textures of complex objects, which contain a lot of different objects that work synergistically with each other.

Now let's understand what materials are.

Materials determine how a three-dimensional object appears on the screen. They also determine the color of the object and how much the surface reflects light. Different materials often have multiple textures. For example, you may come across a diffuse texture, a normal map, and a specular map.

These are all different types of textures, but together they affect the final appearance of an object, as if giving it a distinctive characteristic.

How to work with these all?

Okay, we've covered the terminology. Now it's time to explain how to work with all this stuff.

So let's say you need to apply a texture. The first thing you need to do is create an object to which the material and texture will be applied. Then, when the object itself is ready, you can attach the texture maps (don't forget the color correction at this stage!). The next step is to adjust the size of the material. You will probably find that the texture is either too large or too small, and it will inevitably need to be adjusted.

In 3ds Max, for example, this is done in the Material Editor tab.

Once you have made the adjustments, you can save the resulting object and consider it done. The next step is rendering, but we'll cover that in a future article.

Yes, we do realize that this guide is too rambling, but this topic deserves its own article, or even two or three. We will also cover all of this a little later on.

So stay tuned!