Blender textures: how to add an image, unwrap UVs, use procedural textures and paint

A texture gives a 3D model its colour, its patterns, its scratches, its roughness. In Blender, all of it goes through materials and their nodes. This guide covers the basics in the order you run into them: applying an image, handling coordinates, using procedural textures, painting on the model, then avoiding the mistakes that leave a texture blurry, stretched or wrong. Wiring up a full PBR material, map by map, has its own tutorial, linked further down.

Texture, material, shader: what each word means

• The material describes how a surface reacts to light. In Blender it is built with nodes, around the Principled BSDF.
• The shader is the node that computes that behaviour: Principled BSDF for most materials, Emission for a surface that gives off light.
• The texture is an image or a computed pattern that makes a material property vary across the surface: colour, roughness, bumps.

Applying an image texture

1. Select the object and open the Shading workspace, which shows the Shader Editor and a preview of the material. Create a material if the object has none.
2. In the Shader Editor, press Shift+A, then Texture > Image Texture, and open your image.
3. Connect the Color output to the Base Color input of the Principled BSDF.

With nothing else connected, Blender places the image according to the active UV map of the object. The node settings matter:

The colour space is the most common mistake. A colour image (a photo, a base color map) stays in sRGB. A map that describes data, such as roughness, metallic, normals or displacement, must be set to Non-Color; otherwise Blender corrects it like a photo and the material comes out wrong, too shiny or too matte.

Coordinates: UV, Generated, Object

An image texture needs to know where to sit. The Texture Coordinate node offers several systems, to connect to the Vector input of the texture, often through a Mapping node that moves, rotates and scales the pattern:

• UV follows the unwrap of the object: the usual choice for an unwrapped model.
• Generated uses the bounding box of the object, with no unwrap: handy for procedural textures.
• Object uses the object's own space: the pattern keeps the same size whatever the shape, which is useful for set dressing materials.

UV unwrapping itself (seams, islands, distortion) is explained in the UV mapping wiki entry, and keeping the same texture detail from one object to the next in the guide on texel density. For very large models, UDIMs spread the textures over several images. These three pages are in French.

Procedural textures

Blender can also compute textures without an image, from formulas. They have no fixed resolution, do not repeat visibly and need no unwrapping. The manual lists thirteen of them, including:

• Noise: fractal Perlin noise, the starting point for clouds, dirt and colour variation. The Perlin noise wiki entry (in French) goes through its settings.
• Voronoi: cells, for stone, scales and cracked surfaces.
• Wave: bands or rings, for wood and ripples.
• Brick, Checker, Gradient, Magic, White Noise, Gabor for bricks, checkerboards, gradients, psychedelic patterns, pure noise and directional textures.

The idea is to combine them: a Noise that distorts a Wave gives wood grain, a ColorRamp turns a grey noise into sharp patches, and a Bump node turns the same noise into surface relief. A procedural texture can then be baked to an image so you can export it to a game engine.

Painting a texture: Texture Paint

Texture Paint mode lets you paint straight onto the model, in colour or in any other map. It needs two things: a clean UV unwrap and an image to paint into. Add a blank image from Texture Paint mode or the Image Editor, at the resolution you want, and connect it to the material. You then paint with brushes, masks and brush textures, in the 3D view or flat in the Image Editor.

One thing not to forget: the painted image lives in memory until it is saved. Save it with Image > Save in the Image Editor, or pack it into the .blend file, otherwise the work is lost when you close Blender.

Moving on to PBR

A realistic material combines several maps of the same texture: base color, roughness, metallic, normals, sometimes displacement and ambient occlusion. The tutorial on PBR textures in Blender plugs each map into the right place, with the right colour space. The wiki entries on the normal map and on displacement explain the difference between fake relief and real relief. These pages are in French.

Common mistakes

• Bright pink texture: Blender can no longer find the image. Use File > External Data > Find Missing Files, or pack the images into the file.
• Stretched texture: the unwrap is missing or distorted, or the scale of the object has not been applied.
• Material too shiny or washed out: a roughness or normal map left in sRGB instead of Non-Color.
• Blurry texture up close: the resolution is too low for its size on screen. Increase the resolution, or repeat the pattern with the Mapping node.

For free textures, Poly Haven publishes textures and HDRIs under the CC0 licence. The HDRI in Blender guide explains how to use them for lighting.