Scented Sliders for Procedural Textures

Abstract

Procedural textures often expose a set of parameters controlling their final appearance. This lets end users tune the final look and feel, typically through a set of sliders. However, it is difficult to predict the changes introduced by a given slider, especially as sliders interact in non–trivial ways. We augment the sliders controlling parameters with visual previews revealing the changes that will be introduced upon manipulation. These previews are constantly refreshed to reflect changes with respect to the current settings. The main challenge is to generate the visual sliders in a very limited pixel space and at an interactive rate. This is done by synthesizing the visual slider from a small set of patches ordered in accordance with the slider. These patches are chosen so as to reveal as much as possible the visual variations induced by the slider. The selection and ordering are achieved by using the seam–carving algorithm to carve patches with low visual impact. The obtained patches are then stitched together using patch-based texture synthesis to form the final visual slider.