Proof in real life

I think one of the best ways to prove the usefulness of a technique is to use it in real life and produce some interesting results. Last summer, I applied example-based texture synthesis when I was designing a T-shirt for a group of football fans (including myself) who love Juventus, one of the most famous Italian football clubs. I obtained some patterns as shown below using a simple zebra-like exemplar, but some of my friends said the final results look like fingerprints. Anyway, I’m really proud of the fact that over 100 people wear the T-shirts designed by me.

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[Paper reading] Procedural Noise using Sparse Gabor Convolution

This paper introduced a procedural noise that offers accurate spectral control, setup-free surface mapping, anisotropic filtering and fast evaluation at the same time.

The noise is formulated as a random pulse process and the Gabor kernel is chosen as the pulse, which has compact support in spatial domain for fast procedural evaluation, as well as compact support in frequency domain for precise spectral control. An interactive tool has been developed for noise design, which allows the user to determine noise pattern by tuning intuitive parameters in frequency domain, such as magnitude, orientation and bandwidth.

Various noise patterns have been created showing that this technique is really useful, and the accompanying video has proven that the design tool is indeed user friendly.

This paper is published on SIGGRAPH 2009 and can be found here or under the project webpage.

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[Paper reading] Stereological Techniques for Solid Textures

This paper presents a method to generate 3D solid textures from 2D images, which applies to solid textures composed of discrete particles.

The 3D particles density is estimated from 2D image via a so-called “unfolding” process, based on a fundamental relationship in stereology. The particle distribution is then synthesized from random initialization, followed by simulated annealing to resolve collisions. Although the algorithms only works for limited kinds of textures, the final results appear realistic and beautiful, especially after adding fine details, which can be obtained as noisy color variation by some other solid synthesis algorithm.

This paper is published on SIGGRAPH 2004 and can be found here.

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