12 - Noise, hypertexture, antialiasing, and gesture

Abstract

This chapter discusses hypertexture and its fundamental concepts, and reviews the essential functions needed to be able to easily modify procedural models. The precursor to hypertexture is solid texture. Solid texturing is the process of evaluating a function over R3 at each visible surface point of a rendered computer graphic (CG) model. There are two distinct ways in which solid textures can be combined with fuzzy shapes. One can either use the texture to distort the space before evaluating the shape or add the texture value to a fairly soft shape function, then apply a “sharpening” function to the result. One of the reasons that procedural texture is effective is that it incorporates randomness in a controlled way. Noise function is an important factor that needs to be considered to achieve procedural texture. The chapter discusses how the noise function is constructed, and how raymarching for hypertexture works. A surface representation based on sparse wavelets is discussed. Also, notions from procedural modeling are applied to human figure motion.