Because there are so many possibilities, texture mapping is a fairly large, complex subject, and you must make several programming choices when using it. For instance, you can map textures to surfaces made of a set of polygons or to curved surfaces, and you can repeat a texture in one or both directions to cover the surface. A texture can even be one-dimensional. In addition, you can automatically map a texture onto an object in such a way that the texture indicates contours or other properties of the item being viewed.