Generating textures on arbitrary surfaces using reaction-diffusion

• Authors: Greg Turk
• Venue: Proceedings of the 18th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
• Year: 1991

This paper describes a biologically motivated method of texture synthesis called reaction-diffusion and demonstrates how these textures can be generated in a manner that directly matches the geometry of a given surface. Reaction-diffusion is a process in which two or more chemicals diffuse at unequal rates over a surface and react with one another to form stable patterns such as spots and stripes. Biologists and mathematicians have explored the patterns made by several reaction-diffusion systems. We extend the range of textures that have previously been generated by using a cascade of multiple reaction-diffusion systems in which one system lays down an initial pattern and then one or more later systems refine the pattern. Examples of patterns generated by such a cascade process include the clusters of spots on leopards known as rosettes and the web-like patterns found on giraffes. In addition, this paper introduces a method which reaction-diffusion textures are created to match the geometry of an arbitrary polyhedral surface. This is accomplished by creating a mesh over a given surface and then simulating the reaction-diffusion process directly on this mesh. This avoids the often difficult task of assigning texture coordinates to a complex surface. A mesh is generated by evenly distributing points over the model using relaxation and then determining which points are adjacent by constructing their Voronoi regions. Textures are rendered directly from the mesh by using a weighted sum of mesh values to compute surface color at a given position. Such textures can also be used as bump maps.