Painting surfaces red or blue or any other solid color may suffice for abstract things like Platonic solids and fractal snowflakes, but not for everyday tangible things like dressers and forests and carpets and barnyard doors. To render everyday things realistically, we paint them with an image texture. The following program shows some things with and without a suitable image texture.
Texture adds realism but hardly guarantees it. It doesn’t give the orange a protruding stem or make the paper clip three-dimensional; it doesn’t compensate for insufficient geometry generally. Results can be mixed. Who would really prefer the sprinkle donut in the previous program to this one:
It’s not that we prefer chocolate glaze to sprinkles (although we might). It’s that the sprinkles look like mere smears of color and the donut’s shape is peculiarly too perfect. In contrast, the chocolate glazed looks like it’s ready to be enjoyed. And yet it happens that the chocolate glazed donut is also computer generated through an elaborate process of which image texturing was only the first step.1 Realism is hard to achieve since it must measure up to reality.2
- Find this and other delectable treats at the Stanford Donut Project. ↩
- Surrealism, having little more than imagination and fantasy as its measures, can be less demanding though just as rich. ↩