Tech report WECS-2002-10: View-dependent Texture Maps

We present a technique for adding view-dependent information to geometry, allowing us to write down, for each point on the surface, what the surface looks like from every direction. This data structure allows the incorporation of “image-based” objects into ordinary rendering, allows broader viewing conditions for image-based objects (one can look at a torus from “inside the hole,” for example), and provides opportunities for compression of image-based objects and for separate interpolation of intensity and color data for image-based objects. We based our work on a surface representation that supports models of arbitrary topology, and discuss various methods for capturing, representing, and compressing the view-dependent information. CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling, Curve, Surface, Solid, and Object Representations, Splines, Image-based Rendering.