Combining Texture Streaming and Run-Time Generation

Abstract

Virtual texturing systems have enabled gigapixel resolutions for textures used in real-time rendering. This allows for more detail and diversity in virtual worlds at the cost of greatly increasing disc storage requirements. In this paper, we propose a compression method that generates parts of these large textures at run-time using the original painting primitives (brushes) from the texture production process. This way, large featureless texture areas can be compressed to a few brush resources. A post-production analyzing phase determines those areas that should be stored as compressed texel data to ensure real-time performance at run-time.