Procedural textures and image textures are commonplace in graphics today, finding uses in such places as animated movies and video games. Unlike image texture maps, procedural textures typically suffer from minification aliasing. Given a procedural texture on a surface, I present a method that automatically creates an anti-aliased version of the procedural texture. The new procedural texture maintains the original texture's details, but reduces minification aliasing artifacts. This new algorithm creates an image pyramid similar to MIP-Maps to represent the texture. Whereas a MIP-Map stores per-texel color, however, my texture hierarchy stores weighted sums of reflectance functions, allowing a wider-range of effects to be anti-aliased. The stored reflectance functions are automatically selected based on an analysis of the different functions found over the surface. When the texture is viewed at close range, the original texture is used, but as the texture footprint grows, the algorithm gradually replaces the texture's result with an anti-aliased one. This results in faster development time for writing procedural textures as well as higher visual fidelity and faster rendering.* #R##N#*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: QuickTime.
['Greg Turk', 'R. Brooks Van Horn']
Procedural reduction maps