Generate "procedural" Type Textures From Photos

[Domarius]

http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rjagnow/research/

 

That first entry on the page seems to be about taking a photo of some rocks, feeding the photo into some program, and it spits out a procedural texture - for use in volumetric rendering (wrong term), I mean how you cut away a peice of the geometry and you see exactly what you would see if you cut into such an object in real life - not a stretched texture of what was outside instead.

 

We know procedural texturing has been around for some time, but this is the first time I've read anything about automatically generating a procedure by showing the program a photo....

 

There is some other cool stuff on that page to, that oDDity might be interested in, like "Stable Real-Time Deformations" which is about using bone type animation but when you bend things to extremes, they don't look wierd, like they normally do. More cloesly deformingn things the way they do in real life.

 

Oh boy, this one blew me away; scroll down to "Real-Time Simulation of Deformation and Fracture of Stiff Materials" (last one on the page)

It's got an animation of a brick actually breaking appart in real time because it hit something!!! Apparently thats the real physics at work, its not a pre-made animation!

Edited February 27, 2005 by Domarius

[oDDity]

THe deformation and animation techniques are just faster methods of doing what can already be done, but the new sterographic method of procedural extraction is very nice. It's limited to particles embedded in a substance ATM they say, like rocks, but the results are very accurate when you see tem side by side with the real thing. Currently procedural textures can be spotted a mile away as what they are - mathematical equations, and I've given up using them almost entirely in favour of 2d organic images maps. Maybe this is what we'll see in future 3d apps.

[Domarius]

Yeah, the procedural textures I've always seen were just dumb swirls etc. trying to look like wood grain or whatever