Deformable Textures

Nowadays, the animation of a 3D model is mainly managed at the geometry level, without accounting for the content of the textures applied to it. However, in the case of textures made of heterogeneous materials with different dynamic properties, one might expect that certain elastic parts of the texture are stretched during animation while some others remain rigid. Not accounting for such phenomena may affect realism, inasmuch as the dynamic behaviour of these materials doesn’t coincide with the expected one.

Starting from the observation that the few existing methods tackling this problem are either too time consuming or intended to very specific cases, we proposed a new approach to manage the deformation of dynamically heterogeneous textures. Our model is based on a vector field to move texels according to a rigidity assigned to them. The method, which is very simple, can be easily integrated into a real time rendering engine. Moreover, control is not restricted to geometry deformation: it enables, for instance, real time texture edition, as well as evolution along with any kind of environment parameter (sunlight, humidity, etc).

At last, we also proposed a solution to the under-sampling problem arising in strongly stretched regions, where only a few texels project onto large surface parts. Thanks to a pre-integrated detail synthesis, these under-sampled areas are rectified on-the-fly during animation.