Pattern Based Procedural Textures

Published in the proceedings of ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics 2003 (I3D 2003)

Sylvain Lefebvre, Fabrice Neyret

This paper presents a framework to create procedural textures from a set of patterns. It relies on recent programmable graphic hardware to compute the color of each pixel from its texture coordinates. The texture is only computed at rendered pixels and there is no constraints on mesh as all computation is done in texture space. Our method allows a strong user control on the resulting texture.

Applications are - but not restricted to - video games (decals, tile map, ...) and flight simulators (landscape texturing). Our framework allows to create a wide variety of textures by combining a set of basic blocks specifying simple operations.

Our results and performance tests were done on a GeForceFX prototype.

Paper (ps.gz)
Paper (pdf) WARNING - Some text in figures may not be printed. Check Figure 2.1

Final video (divx)
Submission video (mpg)
Talk slides
/Publications/2003/LN03/aaaa_teaser.png (478x301, 206 kB) A landscape model textured with our procedural tiling method.
/Publications/2003/LN03/aaa_atile.png (1024x1024, 1.9 MB) Simple aperiodic tiling. Each cell of the Virtual Tile Map contains a pattern which is chosen aperiodically.
/Publications/2003/LN03/aab_atile.png (900x898, 851 kB) Aperiodic tiling with spatial control of probability distribution. An Areas Map is used to describe which probability distribution to use in which area. As you can see, the resolution of the areas map is lower than the resolution of the virtual tile map.
/Publications/2003/LN03/aac_atile.png (896x898, 920 kB) Same as above with interpolation (dithering) of the areas map. The transition from one distribution to another is smoothed.
/Publications/2003/LN03/aba_land.png (1024x1024, 2.6 MB) A quad textured with our procedural tiling method for landscapes.
/Publications/2003/LN03/aca_leaves.png (1024x1024, 947 kB) Random positioning of leaves (sparse convolution) on a transparent background.
/Publications/2003/LN03/acb_leaves.png (1024x1024, 701 kB) Same as above with different leaf species.
/Publications/2003/LN03/acd_leaves.png (1024x1024, 184 kB) Random positioning of leaves with a spatial control on probability distribution using a Dithered Areas Map.
For more informations about performances please see this page. Drops of Water shader: this shader uses some of the methods described in the paper.

Paper, images, and videos are under copyright.