Texture mapping has become an essential tool in any synthetic rendering scheme that aims at photorealism. Texture mapping typically associates any point on the surface of the rendered object with a location in the texture space. The surface point is then assigned rendering attributes, such as color or translucency from the respective location found in the texture space. Texture mapping techniques have also been used in attempts to emulate highly detailed geometry on the surfaces of objects. The proposed surface detail synthesis approach closes the loop from modeling to rendering using computer graphics texture mapping techniques, bringing them back into the geometric modeling phase. This article focuses primarily on texturing techniques that relate to shape modeling and surface geometry alteration.