Fast three-dimensional Texture Synthesis

Three-dimensional (3D) textures are popular for texturing solid objects. They usually achieve superior results over con-ventional two-dimensional (2D) texture mapping techniques. However, whereas 2D textures can be obtained using for ex-ample a photograph, capturing or generating solid textures is not straightforward. Procedural techniques can replicate some types of materials, but are usually difficult to control. An alternative is exemplar-based texture synthesis where 3D textures are generated from a few 2D pictures. Unfortu-nately, the synthesis from exemplars is very challenging and usually requires very long computation times. In this paper we present a new algorithm for fast solid tex-ture synthesis from 2D input exemplars. Our method ex-tends an existing real-time synthesis approach which has so far been limited to 2D texture synthesis only. The mod-ifications we made allow a hardware-accelerated synthesis utilising the computational capabilities of today’s graphics cards. To our knowledge, our method is the first solid tex-ture synthesis approach that was specifically designed for an execution directly on graphics hardware