Mesh color textures

Abstract

The fundamental limitations of texture mapping has been a long standing problem in computer graphics. The cost of defining and maintaining texture coordinates and the seams that introduce various filtering inconsistencies lead some graphics applications to adapt alternative techniques that directly address these problems, such as mesh colors. However, alternatives to texture mapping introduce run-time cost that contradicts with the performance constraints of real-time graphics applications. In this paper we introduce mesh color textures that offer all benefits of mesh colors to real-time graphics applications with strict performance constraints. Mesh color textures convert the mesh color data to a format that can be efficiently used by the texture filtering hardware on current GPUs. Utilizing a novel 4D texture coordinate formulation, mesh color textures can provide correct filtering for all mipmap levels and eliminate artifacts due to seams. We show that mesh color textures introduce negligible run-time cost with no discontinuity in texture filtering. We also discuss potential future modifications to graphics hardware and API that would further simplify the use of mesh color textures in real-time graphics applications.