NormalShop: Modeling surface mesostructure

Normals 1 have been used in geometry acquisition and rendering for years. However, modeling with normals is limited because of the lack of formally defined operations. We present surface normal operations built on two key ingredients. First, a separation of models in two levels, while the base surface is represented by positions in a mesh, the details are only represented through normals in a parametric space. We edit the detail normals, while the base surface remains unchanged. In this way, we do not require a reconstruction step. Second, our editing operations are performed in an orthogonal projection. Besides being more intuitive for the user, normals in this mapping are in fact an RGBN image. This lets us define normal operations including combination, sketching features, filtering, warping and texture synthesis. Since we build custom orthogonal charts for operations, processing is not restricted to the original charts. Keywords-normal maps, RGBN image, details, base surface, filtering, warping, texture synthesis, orthogonal chart