To create complex and realistic 3D objects, we make frequent use of textures. A texture is an image created by an artist in an external program (like Photoshop) that provides graphical information to the material. Textures are first imported into Clara.io and can then be applied to materials as maps. The texture information is interpreted differently, depending on which map it occupies.
The most commonly used texture material shaders are Diffuse, Specular, Ambience, Bumps, and Normals. You can learn more about these shaders in the Material section of this guide.
One of the ways texture information is used is as mask. When the texture treated as a mask, its brightness value is used to specify the intensity of a value. This means white values are at full intensity, black values have zero intensity, and gray values fall somewhere in between. Any color information is treated as gray-scale in this case.
Geometry vertices store information known as UV coordinates which detail how the texture is projected onto the geometry. You can learn more about this in the UVs section of this guide.
