Reconstruction of Volumetric Surface Textures for Real-Time Rendering

Abstract

Volumetric texturing is a popular technique for rendering rich 3-D detail when a polygonal surface representation would be ineffective. Although efficient algorithms for rendering volumetric textures have been known for years, capturing the richness of a real-life volumetric materials remains a challenging problem. In this paper we propose a technique for generating a volumetric representation of a complex 3-D texture with unknown reflectance and structure. From acquired reflectance data in the form of a 6-D Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF), the proposed algorithm creates an efficient volumetric representation in the form of a stack of semi-transparent layers each representing a slice through the texture s volume. In addition to negligible storage requirements, this representation is ideally suited for hardware-accelerated real-time rendering.