Acquiring shell textures from a single image for realistic fur rendering

To synthesize a realistic appearance of mammals, it is necessary to express disorderly lie of hairs. "Shell texturing method", proposed by Lengyel [2001], is possible to synthesize realistic fur appearance over arbitrary surfaces in real-time. Prior to rendering, it is necessary to prepare several shell textures as a pre-process. However, acquiring appropriate shell textures is a complicated and time consuming work. In this paper, we present a novel method to acquire shell textures only from a single input picture of an actual animal fur. Since every shell textures are automatically computed by a pixel shader in run-time, it is not necessary any complicated pre-computation. Furthermore, conventional shell texturing method employs typically 16 textures which require huge graphics memory. Because our method requires only a single texture, we realize a significant reduction in memory usage for practical purpose.