Interactive solid texturing using point-based multiresolution representations

Abstract

This paper presents an interactive environment for texturing surfaces of arbitrary 3D objects. By uniquely using solid textures and applying them to the surface, we do not require an explicit parameterisation in texture space. Various solid textures can be combined by building a constructive texturing tree of space partitions to define the photometric attributes at each location of the object. Though solid texturing using constructive textures is very powerful, mainly because of its generality, it is quite difficult to use in practice as it is not well suited to interactive tools. To overcome this limitation, we use a multiresolution point-based representation ensuring that texture evaluation and rendering maintains a given frame rate. Our tool is realized as a plugin for the Pointshop3D system. The main advantage of our texturing approach compared to Pointshop3D is that point-based rendering is only used during the interactive texturing step. We always keep a feedback to the initial geometric representation of the object (polygonal mesh, parametric or implicit surface, voxel arrays, or whatever) which means that the final textured object can be easily exported to standard graphics software that cannot directly handle discrete surface points (e.g. CAD systems, photorealistic rendering engines).