A survey of 3D texturing

Texturing is indispensable for the realistic rendering since it adds surface details that are usually too complex to be modeled directly. Conventional 2D texture mapping remains the most usual approach to texturing, in particular for real-time applications. However, there are some major drawbacks inherent to this approach: the distortion and the discontinuity of textures as well as the lack of the "third" dimension information (geometric effects like roughcast cannot be rendered). 3D texturing has been introduced to computer graphics to resolve these problems. There are two types of 3D texturing: solid texturing that consists of defining color variations through the entire 3D space instead of the 2D one and geometric texturing that consists of adding a "real" third dimension information to surfaces in the form of "real" apparent geometry. This paper presents a detailed survey of 3D texturing. Main principles, advantages, drawbacks and applications are presented. The crucial problem of 3D textures synthesis is studied with a particular attention to analytical methods as well as physical-based models that can provide interesting solutions to this problem. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.