Seamster

Inconspicuous Low-Distortion Texture Seam Layout

Abstract

Surface texturing aids the visualization of polygonal meshes by providing additional surface orientation cues and feature annotations. Such texturing is usually implemented via texture mapping, which is easier and more effective when the distortion of the mapping from the surface to the texture map is kept small.

We have previously shown that distortion occurs when areas of high surface curvature are flattened into the texture map.By cutting the surface in these areas one can reduce texture map distortion at the expense of additional seam artifacts.

This paper describes a faster technique for guiding a texture map seam through high distortion regions, while restricting the seam to regions of low visibility. This results in distortion reducing seams that are less visually distracting and take less time to compute. We have also observed that visibility considerations improve the speed of a recent method that adds cuts to reduce a surface genus.

Figures

(a)
(b)
(c)

Seamster efficiently figures out where to cut an object to flatten it. Figure (a) shows that the seam (in blue) sneaks through low visibility regions of the model (in red) to cut into high curvature vertices, reducing the distortion of the flattening (b) and texturing (c).

(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)

Region distortion. The spikes identify the vertices which represent high distortion regions. The colored regions around them identify the corresponding regions. (a) Cylindrical regions generated on cow's tail using basic distortion definition. (b)-(d) Vertices responsible for 25% of the head model distortion. (b) Regions and vertices generated based only on local curvature at the vertices. (c) Regions and vertices generated within five edges with no overlap avoidance. (d) Same, with overlap avoidance.


Prize-collecting Steiner tree.	Seamster

Seams reducing the genus of a figure eight model and the resulting texture.

Moon (2K faces) Head (7K faces) Cat (670 faces)

Regions of extremum points on the triceratop. Shortest length seam connecting the extremal vertices. Least visible seam connecting the extremal vertices.

Visibility & Seam Flattened Textured

Large dinosaur model (28K faces)

Geometry Images Seamster

(a)	(b)	(c)
Seamster efficiently figures out where to cut an object to flatten it. Figure (a) shows that the seam (in blue) sneaks through low visibility regions of the model (in red) to cut into high curvature vertices, reducing the distortion of the flattening (b) and texturing (c).

(a)	(b)	(c)	(d)
Region distortion. The spikes identify the vertices which represent high distortion regions. The colored regions around them identify the corresponding regions. (a) Cylindrical regions generated on cow's tail using basic distortion definition. (b)-(d) Vertices responsible for 25% of the head model distortion. (b) Regions and vertices generated based only on local curvature at the vertices. (c) Regions and vertices generated within five edges with no overlap avoidance. (d) Same, with overlap avoidance.


Regions of extremum points on the triceratop.	Shortest length seam connecting the extremal vertices.	Least visible seam connecting the extremal vertices.