What coordinates are chosen by default in Texture nodes?

Question

I have created a texture coordinate node and then deleted it. This action shows a small difference after rendering and I'm interested in describing this difference in words.

If you are using an image texture, blender picks the "UV" Texture Coordinate by default. Procedural textures (ex: Noise Texture) use "Generated" by default. Generated represents the bounding box of your mesh, with coordinates 0,0,0 at the "bottom" corner. — Christopher Bennett, Dec 22 '20 at 19:01
To understand more about the differences in texture mapping watch this video: Manipulate texture coordinates like a boss — susu, Dec 22 '20 at 19:08

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 23 '20 at 06:06

As Christopher Bennett says in the comments, when you have no texture coordinate attached, it is picking a default for you, that default uses UV coordinates for mapping.

When you use Generated coordinates something interesting is happening. It's attempting to map the image on the Z axis to your object, and since that axis doesn't exist for your two dimensional image, it's repeating the pixels at the edge of the texture along the Z axis of the object.

What coordinates are chosen by default in Texture nodes?

1 Answers1