Texture Size Reduction Through Symmetric Overlap and Texture Carving

Abstract

Maintaining memory efficient 3D assets is critical for game development due to size constraints for applications, and runtime costs such as GPU data transfers. While most prior work on 3D modeling focuses on reducing triangle count, few works focus on reducing texture sizes. We propose an automatic approach to reduce the texture size for 3D models while maintaining the rendered appearance of the original input. The two core components of our approach are: (1) Overlapping identical UV charts and folding mirrored regions within charts through an optimal transport optimization, and (2) Carving redundant and void texels in a UV-aware and texture-aware way without inverting the UV mesh. The first component creates additional void space, while the second removes void space, and their combination can greatly increase texels utilized by the UV mesh at lower texture resolutions. Our method is robust and general, and can process a 3D model with arbitrary UV layout and multiple textures without modifying the 3D mesh. We evaluate our approach on 110 models from the Google Scanned Object dataset and 64 models from Sketchfab. Compared to other approaches, ours has on average 1-3 dB PSNR higher rendering similarity and reduces pixelation in visual comparisons.