3D texturing is the process of giving a 3D model its surface: colour, wear, scratches, how shiny or rough each part is, and the small details that are too fine to model. Texturing in 3D works by painting or generating 2D images, called texture maps, and wrapping them onto the model through its UV layout. A shader then reads those maps and tells the engine how the surface reacts to light.
In games, texturing does more of the work than most beginners expect. A low-poly crate with good textures reads as worn steel or splintered wood. The same crate with a flat colour reads as a grey box. This guide explains what texture maps do, how the standard game workflow fits together, and what to learn first.
Made by Ester Fallesen, CADA student, Class 18
What is 3D texturing?
A 3D model on its own is just shape. Texturing describes what that shape is made of. A texture artist takes a model, usually after it has been UV unwrapped, and creates the maps that define its material: painted metal on the panels, rubber on the handle, rust where water would collect, dirt in the corners.
Two terms are easy to mix up:
- Texturing is creating the image maps: base colour, roughness, normal and so on.
- Shading is setting up the material or shader that reads those maps and calculates how the surface responds to light.
In practice, game artists do both, so most people talk about shading and texturing together. Rendering, lighting and camera work are separate stages and not part of texturing.
Before you can texture well, you need to be comfortable moving around a 3D scene and working with meshes. If you are completely new, the free Blender 3D Bootcamp gets you there in six live online sessions, with no experience needed.
How texture mapping works
Texture mapping means applying a 2D image to the surface of a 3D model. To do that, the model needs UV coordinates: a flattened version of its surface, like the net of a cardboard box laid out on a table. Each point on the model knows which pixel of the texture it should show.
The quality of your UVs sets the limit for the quality of your textures. Stretched UVs stretch the texture, badly placed seams show up as visible lines, and wasted space lowers the resolution. We cover this properly in our guide to UV mapping for games, so here we assume your model is already unwrapped.
PBR texture maps for games
Almost every modern game engine uses physically based rendering (PBR). The idea is that materials are described by their physical properties, such as how rough or metallic they are, rather than painted with fake highlights and shadows. A PBR material then looks correct under any lighting the level designers set up, from a bright exterior to a dark corridor.
The standard for games is the metal/roughness workflow. These are the maps you will make for nearly every asset:
- Base colour. The pure colour of the surface, with no lighting or shadows painted in. Painted-in shadows are the most common beginner mistake, because they look wrong as soon as the light moves.
- Metallic. A greyscale mask that says whether a pixel is metal or not. In most cases it should be pure white (metal) or pure black (not metal). Painted metal is not metal, because the paint is what you see.
- Roughness. A greyscale map of how rough or smooth the surface is at a microscopic level. Black is smooth and sharply reflective, like polished chrome. White is rough and matte, like chalk. Roughness is where most of a material's character lives: fingerprints, worn edges and dust all show up here.
- Normal. A map that stores the direction each point of the surface faces. The red, green and blue channels hold the X, Y and Z of that direction. The engine uses it to light the surface as if it had dents, grooves and bolts that are not really in the geometry. A normal map does not contain lighting. It contains direction, and the engine does the lighting.
- Ambient occlusion (AO). A greyscale map of where ambient light is blocked, such as in crevices and where parts meet. It adds contact shading that the real-time lighting might miss.
- Height. A greyscale map of how far each point sits above or below the surface. In games it is mostly used as a source while texturing, or for effects like parallax that fake depth, rather than to move real geometry.
Some materials need extra maps, such as emissive for glowing screens and lights, or opacity for leaves and fences. Start with the six above. They cover most props and environments.
One practical detail: there are two conventions for the green channel of a normal map, often called OpenGL and DirectX. Blender uses OpenGL and Unreal Engine uses DirectX. If your details look lit from the wrong side in the engine, the green channel is flipped. Export in the format your engine expects.
Made by Victor Skarbye, CADA student
The game texturing workflow, step by step
1. Prepare the low-poly model
Start with a clean, game-ready mesh: real-world scale, sensible topology and a finished UV layout. Fix problems here. Changing the UVs after you have textured means redoing work.
2. Bake from the high poly
Many game assets have two versions: a detailed high-poly model, often sculpted or subdivided, and the low-poly model that goes into the game. Baking transfers the detail from the high poly onto texture maps for the low poly. The usual bakes are the normal map, ambient occlusion, curvature (which edges are convex or concave) and an ID map that separates materials by colour.
Baking problems are common at first. The usual causes are a cage or ray distance that is too small or too large, overlapping UVs, and hard edges that do not match UV seams. Check your bakes closely before you start painting, because every later step builds on them.
3. Set up base materials
In a texturing application such as Substance 3D Painter, or in Blender, block in the main materials first: steel, paint, rubber, plastic. Get the base colour, metallic and roughness values right for each one before you add any wear. A simple, correct material beats a detailed, wrong one.
4. Add wear and storytelling
Now add the history of the object. Paint chips on exposed edges, dirt in the crevices, scratches where hands touch it, streaks below bolts where rain runs. Use the baked curvature and AO maps to place wear where it would really happen. Ask yourself what this object has been through, and keep the answer consistent across the whole asset.
5. Check it in the engine
Texturing applications and game engines never look exactly the same. Export your maps, bring the asset into the engine, and look at it under the game's lighting, at the distance the player will see it. Adjust roughness and colour values there, not just in the painting application.
Texel density, briefly
Texel density is how many texture pixels cover a given area of the model, usually measured in pixels per metre. If a crate has twice the texel density of the wall behind it, the crate looks sharp and the wall looks blurry, and the scene feels inconsistent. Most game projects set a target texel density, and artists scale their UVs to match it. The UV mapping guide linked above explains how to keep it consistent in Blender.
Unique textures, tiling textures and trim sheets
Not every asset in a game gets its own set of hand-made textures. There are three main approaches, and studios use all of them.
- Unique textures. One set of maps made for one asset, like a hero weapon or a character. The highest quality, but the most texture memory and the most work.
- Tiling textures. Seamless materials that repeat across large surfaces, like brick, concrete, grass or wooden planks. One texture can cover an entire building. Artists break up the repetition with vertex painting, blending between materials and decals.
- Trim sheets. A single texture containing strips of detail such as edges, panel lines, pipes and mouldings. You lay out the UVs of many different models over the right strips, so dozens of assets share one texture set. Trim sheets are standard for environment art because they save memory and keep a level visually consistent.
If you want to work in environment art, learn tiling textures and trim sheets early. Portfolios that only show unique textures on single props miss a big part of how games are actually built.
Channel packing
A texture has red, green and blue channels, and greyscale maps only need one channel each. So game artists pack several greyscale maps into one texture to save memory and texture samples. A common setup puts ambient occlusion in red, roughness in green and metallic in blue, often called an ORM texture. Remember to turn off sRGB on packed textures in the engine, because they hold data, not colour.
Procedural textures and hand painting
A procedural texture is generated from rules and noise rather than painted pixel by pixel. Substance 3D Designer and Blender's shader nodes both work this way. Procedural materials are flexible: you can change the size of the bricks or the amount of rust with a slider. They are ideal for tiling materials.
Hand-painted texturing is the other end of the scale. Stylised games often paint lighting and form directly into the colour map and rely less on PBR detail. It is a valid style with its own skills, and our guide to video game art styles explains where it fits. For most beginners, PBR is the better place to start, because it is what most studios use.
Made by Gabriel Bachmann, CADA student
Common texturing mistakes
- Lighting painted into the base colour. Leave shadows to the engine and the AO map.
- Grey metallic values. Values between metal and non-metal look like neither. Use them only for transitions such as rust or dirt on metal.
- Flat roughness. A single roughness value across a whole object looks like plastic. Real surfaces vary.
- Wear everywhere. Damage only looks believable where it would actually happen.
- Judging only in the texturing application. Always check in the engine, under game lighting.
Learn texturing for games with CADA
If you are new to 3D, start with the free Blender 3D Bootcamp: six live one-hour online sessions over three weeks, recorded, starting in Blender and finishing in Unreal Engine in the last session, with no experience needed.
If you are ready to commit, the Certificate in 3D for Games is a 60-week online programme with no 3D experience or portfolio needed to apply. You try each specialisation before you choose one, and you build game assets with a team in projects each term, from a walkable story environment to a vertical slice.