Procedural Textures are a category of textures used to generate patterns that can be used by themselves or in combination with the Mapping and Color textures to create common surface effects. This is a very memory efficient way to generate patterns as the calculations require less memory than loading bitmap images. Procedurals can be used to create rock and marble surfaces, chequered or wooden textures, bump maps and other advanced materials with minimal impact to GPU memory. It is advantageous to explore creating materials using these textures before resorting to image-based textures: