texturen

Texturen, the German term for textures, are digital images or procedurally generated patterns used to cover 3D surfaces with color, pattern, and material properties. In computer graphics, textures are mapped to geometry through texture coordinates, so the image wraps around the model according to the UV layout. Texturen can be raster images such as PNG, JPEG, or TIFF, or they can be generated procedurally by mathematical functions. Raster textures may be tiled or clamped to extend across large surfaces and are often compressed to save memory and bandwidth.

Texture filtering governs how texels are sampled when a surface is viewed at different distances or angles. Techniques such as nearest-neighbor, bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic filtering reduce sampling artifacts. Mipmapping precomputes progressively smaller versions of a texture to improve performance and image quality for distant geometry.

Common types of texturen include color maps (albedo or diffuse), normal maps (to encode fine surface detail as normals), roughness maps, metallic maps, specular maps, and ambient occlusion or height maps. Physically based rendering (PBR) uses several maps together to define how light interacts with a material.

In practice, artists unwrap UVs to lay out textures on a model, bake details from high-resolution models into maps, and organize textures into atlases to reduce draw calls. Managing resolution, tiling, seams, color space, and compression are important for both visual fidelity and performance.

Texturen play a central role in video games, films, product visualization, and 3D design, enabling realistic or stylized surface appearances across platforms.