Re: what's the point of bitmaps?

I would say it does have to do with scaling.
If your texture needs to repeat to have the scale of the texture at the needed
size you will see it. If you are using a bitmap with 8x24 bricks in it and that
fits your model, no problem. But, if at this scale the bricks are as big as your
model's door you will have to scale it by multiplying the number of times the
bit map is used to to get the bricks at the right scale for your model. Say you
had to tile it 10 times to bring it to the right scale, if you had a bitmap that
had ten times the number of bricks you could use it with no tiling.
Procedural textures is the way to go for this type of thing,
they can be scaled without the tiling problem.