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