Texture

Texture maps are used for adding detail to a mesh. They are bitmaps and their width and height must be a power of 2.
Grit recommended texture format is DirectDraw Surface (dds) with appropriate compression. This will give the best performance and appearance. However Grit also supports many other formats.

Textures are mapped to polygons using the first UV coordinate channel.

See also the DirectDraw Surface page for info on what DDS compression to use with each different texture maps.

Types

Color

Diffuse Map

The color texture, gives the base detail and color. Sometimes called 'albedo' or 'color'. In Grit the diffuse map (despite the name) is used to mask the lighting of the surface with both ambient and diffuse light.

The alpha channel of the diffuse map is used to determine the opacity of the texture, where white is opaque and black is fully transparent.

Translucency Map

Translucency maps are used to fake Subsurface scattering

. Translucency maps can be greyscale or full colour, and mask the light coming through the polygon from the other side. Black represents all light being blocked (i.e. the other side being black) and white will mean both sides will be lit the same. Translucency maps usually are lower resolution than the other maps in the material.

They usually use the suffix SSS

Emmisive Map

Specular Maps

Specular Map

Controls the brightness/colour of the specular highlight on the texture.

The specular texture represents how much the surface should reflect the lights. Grit supports grayscale and coloured specular maps.
In a specular map, black represents no reflection, and white total reflection.

Gloss Map

Controls the width (i.e. the falloff) of the specular highlight on the texture.

Bump Maps

Normal Map

Normal maps are used to add more details to the model without adding more polygons. One common use is to generate a normal map out of a highpoly model to a lowpoly model, so the lowpoly model looks like the highpoly model.

Parallax map

Light Maps

Light Map

Light maps are texture that store the prerendered lighting. Useful for indoor scenes.!Techniques

Atlassing

A texture atlas is a large texture that contains smaller textures. They are used to avoid more draw calls on a model, by not needing to not load a high number of texture, only one.

Mip Mapping

Mip Maps are used to reduce the texture aliasing when it is rendered, used for example to avoid noisy textures that are far away.