Meta-Relief Texture Mapping with Dynamic Texture-Space Ambient Occlusion

We present an efficient technique for modeling and rendering complex surface details defined at multiple scales. Conceptually, meta-relief texture mapping can be described as recursively mapping finer relief-texture layers on top of coarser ones. Such a factorization has several desirable properties. For instance, it provides a way of simulating highly-complex surface details as a combination of simpler and inexpensive image-based representations. This greatly simplifies the modeling of surface details, enhancing the artists´ expressive power. We also introduce a dynamic texture-space ambient-occlusion technique for relief mapping, which greatly improves the quality of relief renderings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques by creating and rendering a number of meta-relief textures with complex surface details which would have been hard to model directly.