Fast three-dimensional Texture Synthesis

Three-dimensional (3D) textures are popular for texturing solid objects. They usually achieve superior results over conventional two-dimensional (2D) texture mapping techniques. However, whereas 2D textures can be obtained using for example a photograph, capturing or generating solid textures is not straightforward. Procedural techniques can replicate some types of materials, but are usually difficult to control. An alternative is exemplar-based texture synthesis where 3D textures are generated from a few 2D pictures. Unfortunately, the synthesis from exemplars is very challenging and usually requires very long computation times. In this paper we present a new algorithm for fast solid texture synthesis from 2D input exemplars. Our method extends an existing real-time synthesis approach which has so far been limited to 2D texture synthesis only. The modifications we made allow a hardware-accelerated synthesis utilising the computational capabilities of today’s graphics cards. To our knowledge, our method is the first solid texture synthesis approach that was specifically designed for an execution directly on graphics hardware.