Welcome to the first part of an 9 part tutorial that should help familiarize you with the workings and operation of the Texture Editor in WCS and VNS. Throughout these tutorials, references will be made to WCS only. Be aware that all of the concepts and applications demonstrated in these tutorials can be applied to the Texture Editor in VNS also.

Before we look at texture editing itself, we must first look at some concepts relating to the texture editor.

A Texture in WCS can be used to do many things. It can control the color, reflectivity or specularity of an object's surface or it can also be used to create variations in height or width, with terraffectors for example. It can be used to control where clouds appear in the sky, and what shape they take. In summary, wherever you see a in an interface then a texture can be created to affect that function in some way, shape or form.

Textures are edited using the texture editor interface. This seemingly complicated beast is in fact very logical, and once you have the basic idea, you'll be creating amazing textures in no time! The texture editor looks like this:

Don't worry if it all looks like gobbledygook - I'll come back to this later on.

The second important term is material. In WCS, a material is any collection of textures applied (or not, as the case may be) to different channels in the surface being affected. In the case of a ground effect, these would be things such as diffuse color, specularity and so on. In the case of a lake, the channels would be somewhat different, including as it does, settings for foam, and additional depth and displacement mapping. In its most simple form, a material consists of a diffuse color and some default settings for the other channels. Since this is a tutorial on the texturing capabilities of WCS & VNS, I shall assume that we want to create more interesting things with the software! The screenshot below shows an arbitrary materials tab. As it happens, this is for the ground effect material, and is quite a plain one - other interfaces where this appears (such as the lake and stream editors) have more parameters associated with them:

The other essential part to texture editing is the concept of a material gradient. This new and powerful feature allows you to blend two or more materials together in various ways. At the heart of this is a material gradient driver which tells the materials how to blend with each other. This driver is itself a texture, and is edited like all textures in the texture editor.

You can see an example of a material gradient interface, using one material, in the screenshot below:

Well, that's it for terminology - proceed on to Part 2 if you haven't been totally phased by this bit!