Assignment 8: Texture Mapping

Objectives:

User a higher level library to map textures onto various geometries.

Description:

In this assignment, you will be mapping textures to models in your scene. Textures are, in a very simple sense, just images, and are used in many different applications in computer graphics. For example, if you want your model to look scaly, you can take a picture of the skin of a lizard, and wrap that image around your model (the alternative being painstakingly coloring each triangle on your model).

The act of mapping your textures to your models is a matter of specifying texture coordinates to each of your vertices. To visualize this, imagine your texture image as a rubber sheet. Mapping a texture is then deciding where and how to stretch and squeeze your texture around the object. Do we wrap it around completely? Do we tile the texture across the surface? Do we paste it on backwards? So a texture coordinate just says, for each point on our model, which point on the texture it corresponds to.

For the required points, you will perform two texture mapping techniques:

1. 2D Texture mapping: Here, we simply take a 2D image and somehow 'paste' it onto a 2D surface.
2. Environment mapping: Here, we treat the surrounding environment as a texture (in particular, we will use a skybox), and map the environment onto the model, making it look like a reflective surface.

How to Proceed:

This lab is different from the previous labs because we will be giving you a fresh library which sums up all of the things you've implemented this past quarter. The library is somewhat based on the 'three.js Links to an external site.' graphics library, which is a heavily used graphics library for web development. Thus, you won't actually be implementing your own texture mapping code.

In the starter code we give you, your scene already contains some geometries, with some textures mapped to them. Study the 'driver.js' code, as the calls made within the 'start()' function are pretty much all you need to complete most of the required points. For the required points, you should not have to mess with the library provided to you. However, you may find it beneficial/interesting to take a peek and to compare/contrast the library with what you have been writing this quarter.

We will go over the library in more detail in lab.

Resources:

Starter code is located in 'Files/Examples/StarterCode/Assignment8StarterCode_v1'

Play media comment.

Play media comment.