Creating textures procedurally
The word “procedural” has been used a lot in recent years, especially in the video game industry, to describe different things. Although one might say everything we have done so far is following a certain procedure, the word means something else in our context. When we imported the texture file in the preceding section, it was already designed for us. In other terms, it was a static file. The word “procedural,” on the other hand, is a fancy word that means dynamic.
In a dynamic or procedural texturing workflow, the goal is to expose certain parameters of the texture so that the texture can be changed on the fly, instead of going back to a graphic editing application. Since it’s all dynamic, you won’t have to import graphic files, and you’ll be able to change aspects of the final texture. For example, if the six-sided die was using a procedural texture, it’d be like changing the color and/or the...