GIT-GVU-92-02

Preserving Arc Length in Texture Mapping

Brian Guenter
Scott Robertson

Conventional mappings from the texture plane to three-dimensional surfaces fail to maintain the arc length of the texture when it is mapped onto the surface. This leads to unnatural texture appearance. In addition, texture gradient information is distorted, leading to poor perception of depth. We have developed an efficient algorithm which warps the texture in the texture plane such that the arc length of the texture on the three-dimensional surface is approximately preserved everywhere on the surface. This leads to much more natural texture appearance and preserves texture gradient information. Texture images are preprocessed before the mapping from the texture plane to the three-dimensional surface so no additional run time overhead is incurred compared to conventional two-dimensional texture mapping methods.

Three-dimensional graphics, texture mapping, arc length

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