Section: New Results

Texture Synthesis

Programmable 2D Arrangements for Element Texture Design

Participants : Hugo Loi, Thomas Hurtut, Romain Vergne, Joëlle Thollot.

Figure 12. Some textures obtained using our operators and mapped onto 3D surfaces.

This work introduces a programmable method for designing stationary 2D arrangements for element textures, namely textures made of small geometric elements. These textures are ubiquitous in numerous applications of computer-aided illustration. Previous methods, whether they be example-based or layout-based, lack control and can produce a limited range of possible arrangements. Our approach targets technical artists who will design an arrangement by writing a script. These scripts are using three types of operators: partitioning operators for defining the broad-scale organization of the arrangement, mapping operators for controlling the local organization of elements, and merging operators for mixing different arrangements. These operators are designed so as to guarantee a stationary result meaning that the produced arrangements will always be repetitive. We show that this simple set of operators is sufficient to reach a much broader variety of arrangements than previous methods. Editing the script leads to predictable changes in the synthesized arrangement, which allows an easy iterative design of complex structures. Finally, our operator set is extensible and can be adapted to application-dependent needs such as 3D texturing, as shown in Figure 12. This work has been published in TOG [3] and presented at SIGGRAPH 2017.