Realistic Textures for Virtual Anastylosis

In the construction of 3D models of archaeological sites, especially during the anastylosis (piecing together dismembered remains of buildings), much more emphasis has been placed on the creation of the 3D shapes rather than on their textures. Nevertheless, the overall visual impression will often depend more on these textures than on the precision of the underlying geometry. This paper proposes a hierarchical texture modeling and synthesis technique to simulate the intricate appearances of building materials and landscapes. A macrotexture or "label map" prescribes the layout of microtextures or "subtextures". The system takes example images, e.g. of a certain vegetation landscape, as input and generates the corresponding composite texture models. From such models, arbitrary amounts of similar, non-repetitive texture can be generated (i.e. without verbatim copying). The creation of the composite texture models follows a kind of bootstrap procedure, where simple texture features help to generate the label map and then more complicated texture descriptions are called on for the subtextures.