Patent ID: 7184052

Claim:
A system for rendering mesostructures for arbitrary non-height-field geometries, comprising: computing a generalized displacement map (GDM) from a mesostructure geometry; performing volumetric texture mapping of the GDM onto a surface of arbitrary geometry represented by a triangle mesh to generate a prism volume for each of a plurality of triangles comprising the triangle mesh; generating a ray from a desired viewpoint through each pixel of each prism volume and identifying a segment of each ray that is within the volume of each corresponding prism in object space; mapping each ray segment to a corresponding ray segment in texture space; using the GDM to determine intersections with the mesostructure geometry for each ray segment in texture space; rendering visible mesostructure pixels for the surface of arbitrary geometry using texture information provided by the intersections with the mesostructure geometry for each ray segment in texture space.