The 3D Handbook
Part 7 — Materials and texturing
Chapter

Texturing techniques

Read these pages in order, or jump to the one you need.

  1. Ways to texture an environmentOverviewA map of the main texturing approaches for real-time environments (unique, tileable, trims, atlases, decals, vertex blending, procedural, photo-sourced and hand-painted), what each costs, what each is good at, and how studios combine them.
  2. Unique texturing (texture painting)TopicGiving an asset its own texture set by painting directly on the model in Substance 3D Painter, 3DCoat, Mari or Blender; layers, masks, generators, smart materials, anchor points, storytelling wear and export presets.
  3. Smart materialsKey termSaved layer stacks in Substance 3D Painter (and similar tools) that rebuild themselves on any baked mesh; what they contain, how studios build shared libraries of them, where they fall short, and how to use them without every prop looking the same.
  4. Tileable materialsTopicMaterials that repeat seamlessly across a surface; how to build them height-first in Substance Designer, from sculpts or from scans, how to check tiling, how to break up repetition, and how to keep them at real-world scale.
  5. Procedural materials (node-based)TopicBuilding materials from connected nodes instead of painting pixels, in Substance 3D Designer, InstaMAT, Material Maker, Blender shader nodes or the Unreal material graph; exposed parameters, SBSAR files, and when to bake versus compute in the shader.
  6. Photo-sourced and scanned materialsTopicMaking materials from photographs, from a single photo converted to PBR maps, through multi-light photo sets, to full photogrammetry scans; de-lighting, cross-polarisation, Substance 3D Sampler, and scan libraries.
  7. De-lightingKey termRemoving the light, shadow and occlusion that a photograph or scan bakes into its colour so the texture can work as a base colour map; capture-time and software approaches, the Unity, Agisoft and Substance tools, and what none of them can fix.
  8. Cross-polarisationKey termA capture technique that puts one polarising filter on the light and a second, crossed filter on the lens to block specular reflections; how it works, the kit, setting it up, extracting a specular or roughness reference, and its limits.
  9. Hand-painted and stylised texturingTopicPainting form, light and material into textures by hand for stylised games; value control, hue shifts instead of black and white, neutral values for reuse, tools and workflows, and how hand-painting combines with PBR.
  10. Trim sheetsTopicTextures made of horizontal strips that tile in one direction, shared by many meshes; why studios use them, how to lay one out, the bevelled "Ultimate Trim" technique, UV workflow, and when trims are the wrong tool.
  11. Texture atlasesTopicPacking the textures of several objects into one texture so they share a material; how atlases differ from trim sheets, why padding matters, how mipmaps make neighbouring tiles bleed, and decal atlases.
  12. DecalsTopicProjected decals add leaks, cracks, dirt, graffiti and damage on top of other surfaces without new UVs or textures; how they work in Unreal, Unity and Godot, which channels they can change, and what they cost.
  13. Mesh decalsTopicDecals made from real geometry (strips and small planes floating just above a surface) that sample a shared decal atlas; used for panel lines, bolts, vents and labels on hard-surface assets, and how to avoid z-fighting.
  14. GeodecalsKey termGeodecal (geo decal, geometry decal) is artists' shorthand for a decal made of real geometry, a strip or patch floating just above a surface; usually a synonym for mesh decal, sometimes used for edge strips, seam-blending skirts or terrain-conforming patches.
  15. Edge wearKey termChipped paint, polished metal and rubbed corners on the exposed edges of an object; how edge wear is generated from curvature and AO, painted by hand, baked into trims or computed in the shader, with examples from shipped games.
  16. Z-fightingKey termThe flickering stripes you see when two surfaces sit at (almost) the same depth; why depth precision runs out with distance, worked numbers, and the fixes artists actually use in kits, decals and engines.
  17. Vertex painting and blendingTopicPainting vertex colours onto meshes to blend tileable materials (clean to dirty, brick to plaster, dry to wet) directly in the level; tools in Unreal, Unity, Godot and Blender, how vertex density limits the result, and per-instance painting.
  18. Height blendingKey termBlending two materials by comparing their height maps as well as the blend mask, so sand fills the gaps between stones before it covers their tops; the maths in plain words, contrast, and landscape layers.
  19. Triplanar and world-aligned mappingTopicProjecting a texture from three directions in world or object space instead of using UVs; how the blend works, how to handle normal maps correctly, what it costs, why textures swim on moving objects, and how to set it up in Unreal, Unity, Godot and Blender.
  20. Detail maps and macro variationTopicLayering a small, highly tiled detail texture for close-up sharpness and a large, low-frequency macro texture for long-range variation on top of a base material; how to blend normals correctly, how to fade by distance, and what it costs.
  21. Breaking up tilingTopicWhy tileable materials form visible grids, how to measure the problem, and the full toolbox for hiding it, from authoring choices to shader techniques (random tile offsets, stochastic texturing, macro variation) and hand-placed breakup, with costs and shipped-game examples.
  22. Normal map blendingKey termHow to combine two normal maps (a base and a detail) correctly; the linear, overlay, UDN, whiteout and reoriented (RNM) formulas, a worked example on real vectors, costs, and the nodes that do it in Unreal and Unity.