Solid-Texture Synthesis: A Survey

Solid textures are an efficient way to compactly represent 3D objects' external and internal appearance, providing practical advantages over classic 2D texturing. Two main methods exist for synthesizing solid textures. Procedural methods obtain colors through functions that algorithmically encode the texture's appearance and structural properties. Example-based methods capture and replicate the appearance as described by a set of input exemplars. These methods can also be classified as boundary independent or boundary dependent. For boundary-independent methods, the shape of the object to be textured is irrelevant, and texture information can be freely generated for each point in the space. Boundary-dependent methods conform the synthesis process to the object's actual shape so that they can exploit this information to orient and guide texture generation. This article reviews the different methodologies' strengths and weaknesses, the classes of appearances they can successfully synthesize, and failure cases. In particular, it focuses on boundary-independent methods' advantages and drawbacks compared to boundary-dependent methods.