3D Texturing Materials & Surface Properties Flashcards

What is 'weathering' in the context of game asset texturing?

Answer: Adding surface imperfections like rust, scratches, and dirt to make objects look used and aged

Weathering involves adding wear details—rust, paint chips, dirt accumulation—to a surface texture to convey age and history.

What is a 'trim sheet' in game asset texturing?

Answer: A tileable texture atlas containing modular trim details reused across many mesh edges

A trim sheet is a single texture containing various modular surface strips that can be mapped to the edges and details of many different meshes.

What is the role of a 'height map' in a PBR material pipeline?

Answer: Encoding surface elevation data used for parallax or tessellation displacement effects

Height maps store grayscale elevation data that can drive parallax occlusion mapping, tessellation displacement, or be converted to normal maps.

In PBR texturing, what does 'energy conservation' mean?

Answer: A surface cannot reflect more light than it receives — diffuse and specular contributions must sum to one or less

Energy conservation is a physical constraint ensuring that no PBR material reflects more light than it receives, keeping renders physically plausible.

What is 'channel packing' used for in game texture production?

Answer: Storing multiple grayscale maps in the R, G, B, and A channels of one texture to reduce draw calls and memory

Channel packing stores separate single-channel maps like roughness, metallic, and AO into the RGBA channels of one image, saving texture memory and GPU bandwidth.

What is 'parallax occlusion mapping' (POM)?

Answer: A shading technique that uses a height map to simulate depth on a flat surface with self-shadowing and accurate silhouette approximation

POM offsets UV coordinates based on a height map and view angle to create the illusion of surface depth and self-occlusion on flat geometry.