Advected Textures

Abstract

Game and special effects artists like to rely on textures (image or procedural) to specify the details of surface aspect. In this paper, we address the problem of applying textures to animated fluids. The purpose is to allow artists to increase the details of flowing water, foam, lava, mud, flames, cloud layers, etc. Our first contribution is a new algorithm for advecting textures, which compromises between two contradictory requirements: continuity in space and time and preservation of statistical texture properties. It consist of combining layers of advected (periodically regenerated) parameterizations according to a criterion based on the local accumulated deformation. To correctly achieve this combination, we introduce a way of blending procedural textures while avoiding classical interpolation artifacts. Lastly, we propose a scheme to add and control small scale texture animation amplifying the low resolution simulation. Our results illustrate how these three contributions solve the major visual flaws of textured fluids.