It's really interesting to see all of the different applications of texturing presented in this lecture. Before this lecture I really just thought about texturing a a mechanism of projecting images onto 3D shapes and then displaying them in pixels in the screen space. I really associated texturing with only color and patterns. Now I see it more as a mechanism of describing the attributes of each pixel in screen space to accurately represent the 3D object. It seems as though textures can play the part of attributes on a 3D object, and the methods of sampling textures from texture space to screen space could be thought of as determining the value of an attribute at that pixel. Like this this case, the attribute is shading. Previously like in bump mapping, we saw a cheap way of simulating lighting; where the texture described the attribute for the amount of light at a certain point along the sphere.
It's really interesting to see all of the different applications of texturing presented in this lecture. Before this lecture I really just thought about texturing a a mechanism of projecting images onto 3D shapes and then displaying them in pixels in the screen space. I really associated texturing with only color and patterns. Now I see it more as a mechanism of describing the attributes of each pixel in screen space to accurately represent the 3D object. It seems as though textures can play the part of attributes on a 3D object, and the methods of sampling textures from texture space to screen space could be thought of as determining the value of an attribute at that pixel. Like this this case, the attribute is shading. Previously like in bump mapping, we saw a cheap way of simulating lighting; where the texture described the attribute for the amount of light at a certain point along the sphere.