Texturing

The power of textures, then, extends well beyond a paint job; it gives you the ability to modify the way your model behaves on a sub-face level, and to do so at a very high sampling rate, depending on the resolution of your map. It is important to keep this in mind before you begin the job of texturing any model. Unless you think of your map as information, it is very easy to put the wrong type of information into your map, and reduce the quality of your final rendered output.

The most common texture channel used is for color, and the most common type of texture map for this channel is a photo-based texture. This is also where many texture problems originate. The reason is that a photograph contains much more information than the color of an object, even though all the information it contains is represented as colored pixels. A thermal image of an intruder on a security camera measures body temperature and ignores all other information. The result is a colored image that looks like a person. It is accurate as an impression of the temperature of that person, but it says nothing about actual color that we might want in a render.