Interactive Volumetric Textures

( Alexandre Meyer and Fabrice Neyret)

Abstract

This paper presents a method for interactively rendering complex repetitive scenes such as landscapes, fur, organic tissues, etc. It is an adaptation to Z-buffer of volumetric textures, a ray-traced method, in order to use the power of existing graphics hardware. Our approach consists in slicing a piece of 3D geometry (one repetitive detail of the complex data) into a series of thin layers. A layer is a rectangle containing the shaded geometry that falls in that slice. These layers are used as transparent textures, that are mapped onto the underlying surface (e.g. a hill or an animal skin) with an extrusion offset. We show some results obtained with our first implementation, such as a scene of 13 millions of virtual polygons animated at 2.5 frames per second on a SGI O2.

Postscript file of the article (543 Ko), and the color page (739 Ko).

PDF file of the paper (911 Ko).

The bibtex entry for this publication:

@InProceedings{MN:1998:IVT,
  author =       "Alexandre Meyer and Fabrice Neyret",
  title =        "Interactive Volumetric Textures",
  booktitle =    "Eurographics Rendering Workshop 1998",
  editor =       "George Drettakis and Nelson Max",
  year =         "1998",
  organization = "Eurographics",
  publisher =    "Springer Wein",
  address =      "New York City, NY",
  month =        jul,
  pages =        "157--168",
  note =         "ISBN  3-211-83213-0",
}

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