Meshed atlases for real-time procedural solid texturing

Abstract

We describe an implementation of procedural solid texturing that uses the texture atlas, a one-to-one mapping from an object's surface into its texture space. The method uses the graphics hardware to rasterize the solid texture coordinates as colors directly into the atlas. A texturing procedure is applied per-pixel to the texture map, replacing each solid texture coordinate with its corresponding procedural solid texture result. The procedural solid texture is then mapped back onto the object surface using standard texture mapping. The implementation renders procedural solid textures in real time, and the user can design them interactively.The quality of this technique depends greatly on the layout of the texture atlas. A broad survey of texture atlas schemes is used to develop a set of general purpose mesh atlases and tools for measuring their effectiveness at distributing as many available texture samples as evenly across the surface as possible. The main contribution of this paper is a new multiresolution texture atlas. It distributes all available texture samples in a nearly uniform distribution. This multiresolution texture atlas also supports MIP-mapped minification antialiasing and linear magnification filtering.