Composite textures: emulating building materials and vegetation for 3D models

In building 3D site models for visualization and virtual walkthrough, most emphasis so far has been on creating the 3D shape models. Less emphasis has been on creating realistic textures, e.g. to simulate building materials or vegetation. Nevertheless, the appearance of object and landscape models will depend at least as much on their textures, as on the precision of their geometry. The paper proposes a texture synthesis technique for the simulation of building materials and vegetation types. As textures can often more easily be described as a composition of subtextures than as a single texture, a hierarchical extension of our basic texture synthesis is proposed. These "composite textures" are based on a kind of metatexture concept, i.e. the layout of the different subtextures is itself modeled as a texture, that can be generated automatically. Examples are shown for building materials with an intricate structure and for the automatic creation of landscape textures.