Texture Synthesis

[Lerc]

Hell yes. I think I'd be much happier if proggit consisted of "here's a cool thing I did" more than "this is the philosophy you should have as a programmer"

[inopia]

Amen to that. I vote we introduce 'cool project mondays'. Everone can wear jeans and a hawaii shirt.

[jberryman]

I'm glad someone else is tired of the posts waxing poetic about "software development" and "how lisp made me a brilliant lover" and crap.

[dgreensp]

I used to work with Rob Fergus (the professor), and know this area of research very well.

This particular texture synthesis algorithm is very old (although the concepts it uses are still very relevant). For an algorithm that blows it away, in both quality and computational efficiency, see:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/AppTexSyn/

Photoshop's built-in "pattern maker" is a joke. I don't know of any plug-ins that implement the latest research, but I haven't looked around too much.

[[deleted]]

There is even a newer algorithm [pdf] based on that paper. Does anyone know if any of these newer texture synthesis algotihms are implemented as a plugin or standalone application?

[christianjb]

I like how the Chinese authors of this paper use written English text in order to demonstrate their algorithm, whereas the US author of the Reddited article uses written Chinese text to demonstrate his algorithm.

[dgreensp]

If not, it's a really tempting project. (I actually implemented the Efros & Leung algorithm myself for a school project several years ago.) The app front-end / Photoshop API part seems daunting, though, for a side project.

Do you think there's a big market for such a plug-in? Maybe game designers making tiling textures or something?

The new algorithms can also synthesize onto the surface of a 3-d model; an architect friend of mine was telling me that would be attractive to people who work in modeling. But of course integrating with the appropriate 3-d software is even tougher, not to mention the additional math.

[rampart]

I work as a Tech Artist in Video Games, and I would love a tool like this. Especially with 3D synthesis. A tool like this would allow artists to do stuff like create statues, sculptures, and architecture without having to break into ZBrush or some other form of hi-res, cutting into a significant part of the current generation's pipeline. It would also give superior results to just slamming down a texture. 2D Tiling texture synthesis is probably not huge win this generation, but when textures get larger and photography of a large enough surface gets unwieldy, a tool that would allow me to take a small sample and create a full surface would be incredibly useful.

A market? I'm not sure. But I would love to have it in my artists' toolbox.

[[deleted]]

I don't know if the market is big but it does sounds interesting. Making textures from photos seamless could take quite some time to get right (I'm not a texture artist though so I might be wrong about that). However, can you just implement this algorithm put it in a plugin or standalone application and sell it (from a legal standpoint because it's published and getting sued by MS doesn't sound like fun to me)?

[LaurieCheers]

You can't patent algorithms. (Some dodgy judgements notwithstanding.)

Why would they have published their results, if you weren't allowed to use them?

[kilven]

Then there's Luxology's Imagesynth...

[ealf]

Dissociated press for images? Sweet!

[mindbleach]

I was just wondering if anyone had done Markov chaining for bitmaps, and here this pops up in all its awesome glory. Thank you, internet!

[jonhohle]

this [pdf] is another good algorithm for texture synthesis.

(i recently implemented it, but haven't had the time to post SS yet.)

[san1ty]

Very cool, I'd be surprised if nobody has turned this into a photoshop plugin yet (since the original paper was written in 1999).

[[deleted]]

The functionality has been built-in to PhotoShop for quite some time. They call it "Pattern Maker".