Acquisition, Compression, and Synthesis of Bidirectional Texture Functions

Real world surfaces such as tree bark, moss, sponge, and fur often have complicated geometry that leads to effects such as self-shadowing, masking, specularity, and interreflection as the lighting or viewpoint in a scene changes. We use image based techniques to analyze and represent bidirectional texture functions, or BTFs, with correct geometric and lighting effects. A basis for the apparent BRDF of points on the surface is determined and used to compress the texture datasets, as well as provide a space for comparison of texture elements across all lights and views. The compression method reduces the approximately 10,000 images in each 6-D lighting, viewpoint, and spatial variation texture dataset to under 2 MB.