Texture

Not to be confused with Material (The actual files the game reads).

A texture is a two-dimensional raster image in the context of a game engine. Textures in Source are stored in the Valve Texture Format, and with a very few exceptions are only accessed through an intermediate material.

While the most common type of texture is the albedo, there are many different uses for raster images in modern game engines. For instance bump maps, which encode three-dimensional height and facing in the color value of each pixel, or specular masks, which determine the intensity of a specular reflection.

Textures differ from materials; textures are the actual images that the game renders and adjusts lighting with. The Material is what the game can actually read and tells the game what to draw.

Tutorials

• Adapting PBR Textures to Source
• Creating a Material (including texture creation)
• Applying Textures (in Hammer)
• UV mapping

See Also

• Material
• Valve Texture Format
• VTFEdit, VTF Shell Extensions and no_vtf
• Material Download Sites