Managed Direct3D - Texture Basics

In this, the latest in my Managed Direct3D tutorial series, we talk about textures.

Generally speaking, what we want is the ability to map images onto the surfaces of our triangles so they can look like brick, metal, leather, or whatever.  

Direct3D has support for this capability through something called textures. A texture is simply an image ? say from a BMP file ? that is ?glued? or ?tacked? onto a triangle or series of triangles. If you do it right, you can have very detailed-looking objects that consist of only a few triangles, and therefore render very quickly.