Synthesis and Rendering of 3 D Textures

We extend the machinery of existing texture synthesis methods to handle texture images where each pixel contains not only RGB values, but reflectance functions. Like conventional texture synthesis methods, we can use photographs of surface textures as examples to base synthesis from. However multiple photographs of the same surface are used to characterize the surface across lighting variation, and synthesis is based on these source images. Our approach performs synthesis directly in the space of reflectance functions and does not require any intermediate 3D reconstruction of the target surface. The resulting synthetic reflectance textures can be rendered in realtime with continuous control of lighting direction.