Texturing is the art of adding color and feeling to each of the objects that have been created. When an object is first modeled and created in 3D it will have nothing more than base colors applied to its different parts. Texturing the object will take it from just being a shape to acutally looking like wood or paper or any number of materials you can think of. The screwdrivers or SiDs as we call them all had to be textured to look like they were made out of plastic or metal. This color that is applied to the objects is called a texture map or sometimes also a diffuse map. It’s an image that is rapped onto an object. Aside from just giving the objects a color we also needed to give them a surface texture. The surface texture can be smooth like glass or bumpy like some plastic or your skin. This surface texture is refered to as a bump or normal map.
Below are some example images used for one of the main screwdrivers.
The images displayed here are quite a bit smaller than the ones we will use in our final production. Some of the images we are using for textures in our final animation are upwards of 1000 pixels wide/tall. This is done to ensure that materials don’t look blurry when we are zoomed in on a small party of an object such as the screwdrivers handles or even the wood texture in a floor needs to look like wood and not a blurry mess of light and dark browns. Already the textures being used for this animation are, in total, over 100 megabytes of images. Thats the equivalent of almost 100 photos taken with a 2.1 megapixel camera at high resolution! At this moment (August 2003) we have only completed about 1/10 the images needed for texturing all the objects and characters.