Texturing changes what a model looks like without changing what it is. The geometry stays; the surface is repainted.
Two ways to describe the surface you want
- A description. Words become a surface: "worn brass with green patina in the recesses". Fast, and vague in the same way words are vague.
- A reference image. A picture of the material, or an edited render of the model itself. More control, and much more predictable — you can see what you are asking for before you ask for it.
The second is usually worth the extra step. A surface is a visual thing, and judging it as a picture beats judging it as a sentence.
The UV layout decides the ceiling
A texture is a flat image wrapped onto a mesh according to its UV layout. If that layout is a mess — overlapping islands, wildly uneven scale, seams through the middle of a face — no amount of texturing quality fixes it. The paint is fine; the wrapping is wrong.
Retexturing a generated mesh usually means unwrapping it first, or accepting whatever layout the reconstruction produced.
What changes and what does not
Texturing writes colour, and depending on the pipeline, the other PBR channels too — roughness, metalness, normal. It does not change the silhouette. A smooth sphere textured as a golf ball is a smooth sphere with dimples drawn on it; at a grazing angle the outline gives it away.
For real dimples you need geometry, or a normal map with enough resolution to hold up at the distance you view it from.
Background matters in a reference
If you supply a reference image, remove its background first. A backdrop's colours bleed into the inferred material — a product shot on a warm grey table produces a texture with a warm grey cast that is nowhere in the object.