Composition of Texture Atlases for 3D Mesh Multi-texturing

Abstract

We introduce an automatic technique for mapping onto a 3D triangle mesh, approximating the shape of a real 3D object, a high resolution texture synthesized from several pictures taken simultaneously by real cameras surrounding the object. We create a texture atlas by first unwrapping the 3D mesh to form a set of 2D patches with no distortion (i.e., the angles and relative sizes of the 3D triangles are preserved in the atlas), and then mixing the color information from the input images, through another three steps: step no. 2 packs the 2D patches so that the bounding canvas of the set is as small as possible; step no. 3 assigns at most one triangle to each canvas pixel; finally, in step no. 4, the color of each pixel is calculated as a smoothly varying weighted average of the corresponding pixels from several input photographs. Our method is especially good for the creation of realistic 3D models without the need of having graphic artists retouch the texture.