Solid-Texture Synthesis: A Survey

It´s common belief that textures can simply and efficiently model 3D objects by separating appearance properties from their geometric description. Computer graphics has profusely used textures to model objects´ external structure, through either photographs or procedural models. Whereas traditional 2D textures usually encode information about an object´s external surface, researchers have proposed extensions for providing volumetric information, allowing encoding of objects´ internal appearance. That is, these extensions provide appearance properties for each point in a predefined volumetric domain V C R3. Such textures are usually called solid textures. This survey illustrates the different algorithms for synthesizing and representing these textures.Surface texturing usually relies on a planar parameterization for associating texture attributes to a 3D object. A planar parameterization maps each 3D point on an object´s surface to a 2D domain, which encodes texture attributes. This 3D-to-2D mapping might introduce a distortion, which generally depends on the complexity of the object´s topology and shape. Finding a good planar parameterization-one that minimizes this distortion remains a challenge.