Real-Time Procedural Solid Texturing

Shortly after its introduction in 1985, procedural solid texturing became a must-have tool in the production-quality graphics of the motion-picture industry. Now, over fifteen years later, we are finally able to provide this feature for the real-time consumer graphics used in videogames and virtual environments. A texture atlas is used to create a 2-D texture map of the 3-D solid texture coordinates for a given surface. Applying the procedural texture to this atlas results in a view-independent procedural solid texturing of the object. Texture atlases are known to suffer from sampling problems and seam artifacts. We discovered that the quality of this texturing method is independent of the continuity and distortion of the atlas, which have been focal points of previous atlas techniques. We instead develop new meshed atlases that ignore continuity and distortion in favor of a balanced distribution of as many texture samples as possible. These atlases are seam-free due to careful attention to their rasterization in the texture map, and can be MIPmapped using a balanced mesh-clustering algorithm. Techniques for fast procedural synthesis are also investigated, using either the host processor or with multipass graphics processor operations on the texture map. We used these atlas and synthesis techniques to create a real-time procedural solid texture design system. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics] Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism (color, shading and texture).