Abstract: Texture mapping with atlases suffer from several drawbacks: Wasted memory, seams, uniform resolution and no support of implicit surfaces. Texture mapping in a volume solves most of these issues, but unfortunately it induces an important space and time overhead.

To address this problem, we introduce the TileTree: A novel data structure for texture mapping surfaces. TileTrees store square texture tiles into the leaves of an octree surrounding the surface. At rendering time the surface is projected onto the tiles, and the color is retrieved by a simple 2D texture fetch into a tile map. This avoids the difficulties of global planar parameterizations while still mapping large pieces of surface to regular 2D textures. Our method is simple to implement, does not require long pre-processing time, nor any modification of the textured geometry. It is not limited to triangle meshes. The resulting texture has little distortion and is seamlessly interpolated over smooth surfaces. Our method natively supports adaptive resolution.

We show that TileTrees are more compact than other volume approaches, while providing fast access to the data. We also describe an interactive painting application, enabling to create, edit and render objects without having to convert between texture representations.