Seamless Compressed Textures

Abstract

We present an algorithm to hide discontinuity artifacts at seams in GPU compressed textures. Texture mapping requires UV-maps, and UV-maps (in general) require texture seams; texture seams (in general) cause small visual artifacts in rendering; these can be prevented by careful, slight modifications a few texels around the seam. Unfortunately, GPU-based texture compression schemes are lossy and introduce their own slight modifications of texture values, nullifying that effort. The result is that texture compression may reintroduce the visual artefacts at seams. We modify a standard texture compression algorithm to make it aware of texture seams, resulting in compressed textures that still prevent the seam artefacts.