Material vs Texture?

Hello!

I’ve been playing with blender recently, and this is my frist time ever doing any 3d modeling, I was just wondering if someone could give me a quick idea on the differenece between a texture and a material.

thanks!

A material defines basic properties like shading, specularity, reflectivity, color, transparency, etc.

A texture gives you control over these different properties on a finer level of detail, which makes it possible to change the characteristics of a certain channel of shading or the mesh itself. This is important because in real life, almost nothing (outside of extremely clean glass) is perfectly smooth/specular/uniform color/etc. Everything tends to have slight variations which make it look real. Textures are what allow us to mimic these variations in 3D.

Textures are 2d or 3d mappings of coordinates to color values – a bitmap or a noise cloud or similar.

Materials define reflectivity (in several senses), colors, shinyness, transparency, and other light-based visual concepts, but they don’t have any bulit-in concept of coordinates – they just say ‘use this color and this formula for brightness for every part of the object’.

Materials can contain textures, the color or intesnsity of which are used tov vary the material’s settings per point on the object’s surace, whether that means the color of that point, the length / direction of its normal, how transparent or reflective it is, etc.

Materials use a mapping to relate the points on the object’s surface to the points in the texture’s world, along with what settings are affected which way and how hard.

I think I made that make sense, maybe :slight_smile:

Well I’m new to Blender as well, but have experience with 3D.
Generally, “material” is a set of material properties, i.e. surface color or texture and it’s scale/position/repetition, reflection, etc.
Texture is basicaly a picture on a face of an object (but it can get much more complicated). So it is/could be one of material properties.

Regards

Thanks guys, that gives me a much better idea about textures and materials now.