Efficient Packing of Arbitrarily Shaped Charts for Automatic Texture Atlas Generation

Abstract

Texture atlases are commonly used as representations for mesh parameterizations in numerous applications including texture and normal mapping. Therefore, packing is an important post-processing step that tries to place and orient the single parameterizations in a way that the available space is used as efficiently as possible. However, since packing is NP hard, only heuristics can be used in practice to find near-optimal solutions. In this publication we introduce the new search space of modulo valid packings. The key idea thereby is to allow the texture charts to wrap around in the atlas. By utilizing this search space we propose a new algorithm that can be used in order to automatically pack texture atlases. In the evaluation section we show that our algorithm achieves solutions with a significantly higher packing efficiency when compared to the state of the art, especially for complex packing problems.