Material Space Texturing

Many objects have patterns that vary in appearance at different surface locations. We say that these are differences in materials, and we present a material-space approach for interactively designing such textures. At the heart of our approach is a new method to pre-calculate and use a 3D texture tile that is periodic in the spatial dimensions (s, t) and that also has a material axis along which the materials change smoothly. Given two textures and their feature masks, our algorithm produces such a tile in two steps. The first step resolves the features morphing by a level set advection approach, improved to ensure convergence. The second step performs the texture synthesis at each slice in material-space, constrained by the morphed feature masks. With such tiles, our system lets a user interactively place and edit textures on a surface, and in particular, allows the user to specify which material appears at given positions on the object. Additional operations include changing the scale and orientation of the texture. We support these operations by using a global surface parameterization that is closely related to quad re-meshing. Re-parameterization is performed on-the-fly whenever the user’s constraints are modified.