Texture mapping

Until now, all of our shapes and models used color, but a whole new world awaits us when we start applying textures to our models. Adding a 2D texture to a 3D model is known as texture mapping, or in some cases texture wrapping. Let's see what it takes to add a little texture to our 3D models. We are going to start with a simple cube.

First, use your favorite image editing software to create a 256 x 256 pixel square and give it some kind of texture. I will be using the following one:

Texture mapping

Save this texture as a bitmap (BMP). We are going to use bitmaps, as opposed to PNGs, for texture mapping because the internal data structure of a bitmap ...

Get OpenGL Game Development By Example now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.