Blender textures are rendered on each triangle individually If I make a new texture, then it draws the same tiny texture on each triangle of whatever I'm drawing. If I modify the material on the cube on the starting scene, it works fine. But I can't figure out how to copy materials, so I can only have one material per scene.

My problem seems similar to the one [here][2], but when I tried their solution, it ended up projecting it onto the UV map. I'm making a procedural texture on a sphere. If I use the UV map, it gets really warped on the poles.

Here's a picture:



The sphere on right is what I want. I made it by modifying the material on the starting cube. It is textured as if it was carved from a solid block of wood.

The sphere in the middle is what I get if I apply a new texture to a sphere. Each triangle is individually given a 2d texture.

The sphere on the left is what happens if I UV unwrap it. It mostly looks okay, but it's really warped at the poles and it has a seam. there are other ways to unwrap it, but there's no good way to put a 2d texture on a 3d object.
When the mesh does not have an UV map, the polygons still have default UV coordinates. The default maps the whole 2D texture to the entire polygon. That's why every face separately repeats what you see in the texture preview.



But to actually get this, coordinate mapping has to be switched to UV.



The procedural wood texture is a 3D texture. It can use 3D coordinates to calculate the color. But only if the coordinate mapping is of a 3D kind. UV is 2D mapping.



The "Object" coordinate mapping is a 3D mapping. Normally it is based on the bounding box of the mesh, but it can be changed in the Texture Space settings for the mesh.