SBIR-STTR Award

A suite of software tools is proposed for the development of bump mapped texture patterns, including patterns of the surface normal vectors, shininess, and shininess strength. The tools are to be built as plug-ins to Adobe Photoshop (tm) beginning with adoption or modification of existing commercial tools for texture pattern generation including dehaze, color correction, perspective correction, autotiling, and sysnthesis. New tools are proposed for interactive generation of bump mapped textures from a single photograph and a materials catalog, from multiple photographs from a single perspective with varying light positioning, and from multiple photographs from a multiple perspectives with a single light position. Requirements for a library of patterns to be built with the tools is to be studied in conjunction with determination of the feasibility of the tool design.

Bump mapping is an emerging technique that promises greatly enhanced realism within visual simulators. While hardware support for bump mapping has appeared, there are no commercially available tools or texture libraries for use in simulations. In Phase I study, we developed new algorithms and programs for generating bump maps either synthetically or from photographic sources. We tested methods for acquiring multiple photos under controlled conditions, and developed new ways of manipulating bump maps to retain fidelity at low resolution. In Phase II we intend to fully implement all of the algorithms, develop interfaces to commercial formats, and produce a library of patterns. The tools will be developed primarily as Adobe Photoshop (r) plug-ins.

Benefits:
Th a suite of tools for generating bump maps and the library of bump map textures will commercialized for both goverment and commercial use. These products will meet the needs of the next generation of simulator databases for defense applications such as the H-60 training simulator. Commercial applications include animation for motion pictures, PC games, virtual reality applications, and commercial simulators. There is a strong unmet need in each of these areas because the rendering hardware and software is available and provides high realism, but tool and library support is lacking.

Keywords:
texture bump-mapping visual simulation tools libraries animation algorithms virtual reality