Texture mapping is one of the most successful new techniques in high-quality image synthesis. It can enchance the visual richness of raster-scan images immensely while entailing only a relatively smann increase in computation. The technique has been applied to a number of surface attributes: surface color, surface normal, specularity, transparency, illumination, and surface displacement-to name a few. Although the list is potentially endless, the techniques of texture mapping are essentially the same in all cases. This article surveys the fundamentals of texture mapping, which can be spilt into two topics: the geometric mapping that warps a texture onto a surface, and the filtering necessary to avoid aliasing. An extensive bibliography is included.

reprinted in "Tutorial: Computer Graphics: Image Synthesis", Kenneth Joy, et al., eds., IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, DC, 1988; earlier version appeared in Proceedings of Graphics Interface '86, Vancouver BC, May 1986