Integration of Complex Shapes and Natural Patterns

The process of generating an image for a computer graphics object is traditionally broken down into three steps: modelling of the shape or geometric attributes (such as height, width, and length), modelling of the visual attributes (how the object is going to look), and an integration step that connects the first two (a visual attribute is defined for every point on the surface of the object). The separation of modelling the shape from modelling the visual attributes makes the whole process highly flexible and powerful; from a conceptual point of view, the process is easier to handle. While generally good for many classes of objects, this separation is prone to problems when the geometry of the object is complex. For example, the mapping of visual characteristics to every point of such complex surfaces is non-trivial. Furthermore, this separation assumes that these two steps are independent of each other, but for some objects, there is an interaction between the shape modelling and visual modelling that plays a significant role on the final image. Typical examples are patterned animals such as giraffes and leopards, where the pattern visible on the fur of an adult animal is the result of a process that took place while the animal was an embryo in the womb. In this case, modelling the interplay between the embryo growth process and the pattern formation process is as important as modelling the