This is a short course I taught at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in October 20, 2005. My goal is to introduce the basic ideas of texturing without going into much algorithm detail. Given the students' background, I believe describing details will only confuse them, and they will likely forget what I taught in a few months. So instead, I took a quite unconventional approach, covering the basic components of texturing in a high level, intuitive manner.From the students' response, they seemed to like the way I presented the materials. This is quite encouraging for me, because this is my first ever official teaching.
Texturing is a fundamental technique in Computer Graphics, allowing us to represent surface properties without modeling geometric or material details. In this course, we describe the basic ideas of texturing and how we could apply textures to objects in real applications. We concentrate on the three main components of texturing: texture acquisition, texture mapping, and texture sampling. For each component, we present the fundamental algorithms as well recent innovations. We also describe implementation issues and additional application of texturing on graphics hardware.