Htex: Per-Halfedge Texturing for Arbitrary Mesh Topologies

TL;DR

Htex is a GPU-efficient, parameterization-free texturing method for arbitrary meshes that uses halfedge-based textures to enable seamless, real-time rendering without explicit UV mapping.

Contribution

Htex introduces a novel halfedge-based texturing approach that supports arbitrary polygon meshes with high performance and simplicity, eliminating the need for explicit parameterization.

Findings

Supports arbitrary polygons without special handling.

Uses only three texture-fetches per halfedge for seamless texturing.

Enables real-time rendering of complex assets.

Abstract

We introduce per-halfedge texturing (Htex) a GPU-friendly method for texturing arbitrary polygon-meshes without an explicit parameterization. Htex builds upon the insight that halfedges encode an intrinsic triangulation for polygon meshes, where each halfedge spans a unique triangle with direct adjacency information. Rather than storing a separate texture per face of the input mesh as is done by previous parameterization-free texturing methods, Htex stores a square texture for each halfedge and its twin. We show that this simple change from face to halfedge induces two important properties for high performance parameterization-free texturing. First, Htex natively supports arbitrary polygons without requiring dedicated code for, e.g, non-quad faces. Second, Htex leads to a straightforward and efficient GPU implementation that uses only three texture-fetches per halfedge to produce continuous texturing across the entire mesh. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Htex by rendering production assets in real time.