All right.
In this video, we're going to be looking at surface appearances.
And surface appearances are a type of texture that can only be applied on something called a mesh part.
And it basically allows us to make textures look very realistic, like they're 3D, even though they're
only coming off of a 2D image.
And the way they achieve that is by overlaying a bunch of images that make the illusion like the textures
3D.
So in order to use a surface appearance, I'm going to put a mesh part into my game here.
So it looks just like a regular part, but this is a special mesh part.
And since it's a mesh part, I can put a surface appearance on it.
And now the surface appearance.
It requires four textures.
One is the color map and I've already uploaded a PBR texture.
They're called this PBR texture, which has the color map.
It has the normal map, it has a roughness map and a metallic map, basically the reflectance.
So I'll put in the color here.
So as you can see, the color of my texture is on my part and then I can put in something like my metallic
map and then I can put in my normal map and then I can put in my you can already see how much better
it's looking.
I can put in my roughness map.
And now, if you look at my texture here.
It is looking quite good.
I mean, that is a very realistic looking texture, even though it's only a 2D image, as you can see
here, there's no depth to this at all.
But just by looking at this texture, it looks like it has depth.
So surface appearances are basically the tool we have in robotics to apply realistic PBR textures on
our parts.
Most of the time these are used by modelers who import their own meshes and they use the surface appearance
after they have baked a texture in a software like Blender.
They use the surface appearance to apply the texture onto their part to make it more realistic looking.
Just using a surface appearance on a part like this isn't very common because, as you can tell, just
like decals, they stretch along with the part.
They're not like a texture, which is kind of unfortunate.
So to actually make a use of surface appearance, you'd have to create your own meshes if you know how
to do that.
But if you don't, then I wouldn't really worry about surface appearances for now.