Texture sprites: texture elements splatted on surfaces

We present a new interactive method to texture complex geometries at very high resolution, while using little memory and without the need for a global planar parameterization. We rely on small texture elements, the texture sprites, locally splatted onto the surface to define a composite texture. The sprites can be arbitrarily blended to create complex surface appearances. Their attributes (position, size, texture id) can be dynamically updated, thus providing a convenient framework for interactive editing and animated textures. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by creating new surface aspects difficult to achieve with other methods.Each sprite is described by a small set of attributes which is stored in a hierarchical structure surrounding the object's surface. The patterns supported by the sprites are stored only once. The whole data structure is compactly encoded into GPU memory. At run time, it is accessed by a fragment program which computes the final appearance of a surface point from all the sprites covering it. The overall memory cost of the structure is very low compared to the resulting texturing resolutions. Rendering is done in real-time. The resulting texture is linearly interpolated and filtered.