Patch Textures: Hardware Support for Mesh Colors

Mesh Colors
provide an effective alternative to standard texture mapping. They significantly simplify the asset production pipeline by removing the need for defining a mapping and eliminate rendering artifacts due to seams. This article addresses the problem that using Mesh Colors for real-time rendering has not been practical, due to the absence of hardware support. We show that it is possible to provide full hardware texture filtering support for Mesh Colors with minimal changes to existing GPUs by introducing a hardware-friendly representation for Mesh Colors that we call
Patch Textures
, which can have quadrilateral or triangular topology. We discuss the hardware modifications needed for storing and filtering Patch Textures, including anisotropic filtering. This article extends our previous work by discussing and comparing patch edge-handling approaches, including an option for sampling the textures of neighboring patches using an adjacency map. We also provide extensive discussions regarding data duplication, a partial implementation present in existing hardware, and the difficulties with providing a similar hardware support for Ptex.