Blender Master Class

Images and Textures

First, a little terminology: The terms image and texture are often used interchangeably. In most circumstances, this is fine, but I shall try to avoid confusion here by explaining my terminology. An image, for our purposes, is a picture, perhaps in the form of an image file, like a .jpg or .tiff file or a file generated within Blender’s UV Image editor with no specific file type assigned to it yet.

A texture in Blender can be any kind of input used to affect the look of a material applied to an object. A texture can be an image, but a texture may also be procedurally generated or taken from a video, point cloud data, or something even more obscure. But because we frequently use images as the input for textures, it’s often ...