Solid texture synthesis for heterogeneous translucent materials

We present a method to synthesize solid textures from heterogeneous translucent materials that have a complex pattern and subsurface scattering effect. A solid texture provides consistent texture throughout the volume, so that it can be used to model the texture on an arbitrary geometry. However, solid texture synthesis requires a huge amount of time to generate the volume. Moreover, a synthesized solid texture acquires only the color information from an input exemplar. Therefore, it has been difficult to render the appearance of a translucent object realistically without additional appearance data. In this paper, we introduce a new search method to accelerate synthesizing of solid textures. This method decomposes the candidates in an exemplar into several subgroups and searches for the best similar neighborhood in each decomposed subgroup. We also apply subsurface scattering effects to the shell layer of a synthesized object for realistic rendering of a translucent solid texture. Experimental results show that our rendering method can produce realistic rendering results for various heterogeneous translucent objects. It can also represent cross-sections of an object realistically without reconstructing the texture and surface geometry.