Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!titan!foo
From: foo@titan.rice.edu (Mark Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: just a random idea
Keywords: monkey coffee-pot playmate, texture mapping
Message-ID: <2269@kalliope.rice.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 88 03:58:37 GMT
References: <7980@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Reply-To: foo@titan.rice.edu (Mark Hall)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 30

In article <7980@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> seth@miro.Berkeley.EDU (Seth Teller) writes:
>I have this idea, see: you take an image (like any bunch of pixels, could even
>be a picture) and you kind of paste it on a surface, like wallpaper on a wall.
>This way you could make the dullest of polygons look interesting. Like you
>could take a Playmate, or a monkey, or something, and put it on a coffee-pot
>(well, maybe a coffee-pot is too hard, I'll think of something else).
>Waddaya say?
>
>	-- seth     seth@miro.berkeley.edu


   I'd say you have reinvented texture mapping. The original idea 
 was to create more realistic surfaces than those representable
 by polygons and bicubic patches. You mapped a texture onto the 
 surface to simulate real surfaces which have non-planar texture. 
 The "texture" can be surface normals, color info, really anything
 you want, even Playmates.

   I think the first reference to this was Ed Catmull's PhD thesis, 
 "A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces"
 University of Utah (1974). You can get a copy of most any thesis 
 by going to your local library. They will have info on where to order
 the thesis from. 

   Many textbooks talk about texture mapping. My old version of Foley 
 and VanDam has a paragraph on it. The reference to Ed Catmull's thesis
 I got from "Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics" by David Rogers.
 Rogers spends about 8 pages on texture mapping.

 - mark