Viewing textures on my model in Object/Edit Mode

Hey guys. I’ve been playing around with Blender for a little while (very little while), and it’s Awesome! But I have a problem, and it’s a little hard to put it to words, so bear with me please…

When I create a material and give it an image, my model in ‘Object’ and ‘Edit’ modes appears unchanged (grey model). However, when I render the model, I see the texture in the rendered image. Unfortunately, since I can’t see the texture on my model while I’m working on it, I cannot get the texture to align properly when the rendered image is created.

Here’s the deal… I can create a model, and it’s colored the default Blender-grey. I then add a material to my model, and the color remains the same. I can then change the color of that material, and I can see the change take place on my model in the Edit/Object window (turn ‘Material.001’ orange, and my cylinder model turns orange). If I assign a texture to the material, the texture never displays on my model (cylinder model is still orange). If I render the model, the texture appears in the rendered image but not on the model that’s displayed in the Object/Edit window.

Would any of you tell me how to get textures to display on my model?

Okay, so here’s the deal: Blender doesn’t have a great way of displaying material textures on an object. It gives each individual vertex the color from the texture, but the area between vertices is just averaged out. Unless you have a lot of vertices, the texture won’t be clearly defined.

There are a couple of solutions:
You could use UV-mapping (probably too much at the moment) OR
Create a bunch more vertices, so the approximated texture is more high-res. The best way to make more vertices is apply a Subsurf modifier (Editing panel, F9) to your object, but change Type to Simple Subdivide. That will create more vertices without changing the shape of your object. Turn up Levels until it looks good enough (4 or 5 works on the cube I tested with).

Oh, and make sure your 3d window is in Shaded mode (SHIFT-z), otherwise you won’t see the texture in any form.

Hope that helps!

Yep, that’s what it was. Shift+Z! Guess I probably punched that key sequence during tutorials before I learned how to load images, and accidently disabled texturing on the model. I pushed it again and the texture appeared on the model. Cool!

Thanks for the help, spacedude!

Mind if I take that, edit it a bit, and put it in the texturing documentation on the wiki? That’s a very clear description of how blender approximates textures for the 3D view.

Sure, go ahead. Glad to help!