Anisotropic Filtering for On-the-fly Patch-based Texturing

On-the-fly patch-based texturing consists of choosing at run-time, for several patches within a tileable texture, one random candidate among a pre-computed set of possible contents. This category of methods generates unbounded textures, for which filtering is not straightforward, because the screen pixel footprint may overlap multiple patches in texture space, i.e. different randomly chosen contents. In this paper, we propose a real-time anisotropic filtering which is fully compliant with the standard graphics pipeline. The main idea is to pre-filter the contents independently, store them in an atlas, and combine them at run-time to produce the final pixel color. The patch-map, referencing to which patch belong the fetched texels, requires a specific filtering approach, in order to recover the patches that overlap at low resolutions. In addition, we show how this method can achieve blending at patch boundaries in order to further reduce visible seams, without modification of our filtering algorithm.