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4.12.3.6 Procedural, Dynamic and Animated Textures

OK so we have the texture mapped onto the polygon, now the fun stuff starts. There are several ways to introduce movement into textures. Here is the terminology used in crystal space to describe these methods and brief explanations of what they entail:

Animated Textures

Lets say we have several precomputed texture images, which when taken in sequence form an animation. An Animated texture is simply when you swap the texture image mapped on to the polygon between the precomputed texture images. This is the simplest, cheapest and most common method.

Dynamic Textures

Dynamic textures are when you manipulate the texture mapping transformation, or the texture co-ordinates directly. This way you can rotate/scroll for example the texture on the polygon while it remains static.

Procedural Textures

If you still can't produce the effect you want with animated and or dynamic textures then you can resort to procedural textures. Another less common name for procedural textures is programmatic textures. This is when you write the texture on the fly. The texture is typically a buffer you render to in the same way as you would render to the main screen. Good procedural texture implementations gives you full blown 3d capable facilities to render to the texture. Fortunately Crystal Space has this :) Typical uses for procedural textures is when the content of the texture responds uniquely to user input or behavior. A good example is having a computer terminal within the virtual world which the user can type on and can see what they type come up on the virtual screen. (see section Procedural Texture System).


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