Adaptive Unwrapping for Interactive Texture Painting
Author(s): Takeo Igarashi, Dennis Cosgrove.
Proceedings: 2001 ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics,
2001.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
We present a method for dynamically generating an efficient
texture bitmap and its associated UV-mapping in an interactive
texture painting system for 3D models. Typical 3D texture
painting programs require the user to explicitly define the
underlying UV-mapping from 3D geometry to 2D bitmap prior to
painting. This mapping is unchanged by the painting process.
However, a predefined UV-mapping can cause distortion at
arbitrary locations and waste bitmap memory in unpainted areas.
To solve these problems, we propose an adaptive unwrapping
mechanism where the system dynamically creates a tailored
UV-mapping for newly painted polygons during the interactive
painting process. This eliminates the distortion of brush strokes,
and the resulting texture bitmap is more compact because the
system allocates texture space only for the painted polygons. In
addition, this dynamic texture allocation allows the user to paint
smoothly at any zoom level. This technique can be efficiently
implemented using standard 3D rendering engines, and the
painted models can be stored as standard textured polygonal
models. We implemented a prototype system, called Chameleon,
and our users’ experiences suggest that our technique is very
useful for simple painting by casual users.