Representing realistic pavement blocks with crack manipulation

Abstract

The depiction of the irregularity in nature is crucial for the realistic representation of the virtual world. For example, real pavement blocks are not always paved evenly, but partially sink over time. Many games or virtual reality systems however represent the pavement too neatly with perfectly flattened surfaces and clean texture images. In this paper, we suggest a method for representing realistic pavement blocks by adding irregularity to blocks. We create uneven surfaces by placing pavement blocks on the randomly generated terrain. We also represent worn surfaces by adding crack patterns to the original texture images along the user-controlled spline curves with Poisson equations. Our method can generate diverse new crack patterns from images of sample patterns and it would be useful to generate random patterns of other linearly-shaped textures as well. Our method is applicable to real-time rendering systems such as games and virtual reality systems since the cracking effects are incorporated into the texture images.