Procedural Textures

Procedural textures are widely used in computer graphics. There is even procedural modeling. When something is procedural, it means the computer can generate it in large amounts without the need for it to be done manually.

Let’s use an example: Say you want to build a city. You can create a few buildings, but then you want to place them throughout your city. You can do this manually, duplicating them one by one and then placing them where you want them. It’s a big city, though, with thousands of buildings, so this method wouldn’t be very efficient. That’s why software offers you ways to do it procedurally; using different tools and giving you some level of control, the software will randomly place the buildings in the city for you.

A procedural texture is a texture that the software generates automatically and that can fit on any surface. These textures are like patterns that repeat randomly and you have some level of control over their features.

In Blender, you have a number of options for procedural textures. On the Texture tab of the Properties Editor, under Texture Type, instead of choosing Image or Movie, you can select any other type of texture to create procedural textures (you’ll see where this option is located very soon). One of these textures is Clouds, and it generates a noisy pattern, useful for giving color variations to a surface. When you select a texture type, the Image panel will be replaced with specific options for your selection that give you control of its properties.

There are a lot of textures: Clouds, Blend, Wood, and Checker to name a few, and each one of them has its own properties and uses. Make sure you check them out!