Catherine de Lange, reporter
As virtual worlds become increasingly interactive, animators have to make sure that objects within them don't just look good on the surface, but also remain realistic when they are manipulated.
This is harder to achieve with some objects than with others. Cut through a virtual sponge, for example, and the texture remains the same all the way through. But take a slice through a kiwi fruit, and the cross section will look different depending on where you cut it, and along which axis.
Previous methods of modelling 3D shapes worked for objects with a uniform texture. But according to Kenshi Takayama from the University of Tokyo, it couldn't handle objects with more complicated texture orientations such as kiwi fruit and tree stumps.
To get around this, Takayama and his colleagues developed a technique that uses existing models of solid textures and applies them to 3D shapes in new ways. An amateur can use the software to vary both the scale of the texture pattern and its orientation along three different axes (see video above). The system is also easy to control and a user can determine the direction of the texture orientation just by drawing on the object.
"An important advantage is that it requires little memory; it only stores a single copy of the original solid texture and a list of 3D texture coordinates," says Takayama. "We hope it can be useful for a variety of applications including games, films, and educational software."