Synthesis of bidirectional texture functions on arbitrary surfaces

The bidirectional texture function (BTF) is a 6D function that can describe textures arising from both spatially-variant surface reflectance and surface mesostructures. In this paper, we present an algorithm for synthesizing the BTF on an arbitrary surface from a sample BTF. A main challenge in surface BTF synthesis is the requirement of a consistent mesostructure on the surface, and to achieve that we must handle the large amount of data in a BTF sample. Our algorithm performs BTF synthesis based on surface textons, which extract essential information from the sample BTF to facilitate the synthesis. We also describe a general search strategy, called the k-coherent search, for fast BTF synthesis using surface textons. A BTF synthesized using our algorithm not only looks similar to the BTF sample in all viewing/lighthing conditions but also exhibits a consistent mesostructure when viewing and lighting directions change. Moreover, the synthesized BTF fits the target surface naturally and seamlessly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with sample BTFs from various sources, including those measured from real-world textures.