Efficient synthesis of gradient solid textures

Solid textures require large storage and are computationally expensive to synthesize. In this paper, we propose a novel solid representation called gradient solids to compactly represent solid textures, including a tricubic interpolation scheme of colors and gradients for smooth variation and a region-based approach for representing sharp boundaries. We further propose a novel approach based on this to directly synthesize gradient solid textures from exemplars. Compared to existing methods, our approach avoids the expensive step of synthesizing the complete solid textures at voxel level and produces optimized solid textures using our representation. This avoids significant amount of unnecessary computation and storage involved in the voxel-level synthesis while producing solid textures with comparable quality to the state of the art. The algorithm is much faster than existing approaches for solid texture synthesis and makes it feasible to synthesize high-resolution solid textures in full. Our compact representation also supports efficient novel applications such as instant editing propagation on full solids.