Hierarchy textures

So, it's been a while. I was so busy at SIGGRAPH that I never had the time to share anything.

In this post, I'm showing you some of the last textures I've been working on. These are build as a hierarchy. We use again our variation of the Voronoi diagram to create weird shapes. But this time, instead of using simply one level, we introduce many levels.

On the first level, again, the Voronoi cells are computed and once we know in which cell we are, if that cell has a sub-level, we can then continue the visit in the structure into that sub-level. Each level has can have a small or big influence on the final color of the pixel.

So, here's some outputs:

One of the first output made. It has two cells on the first level. One is the circle-like shape in the middle and then the rest. In the "rest", there's a sub level with a simple small division of the plane in two.

Exactly as the previous one, but here, there's a sub-level in the circle-like shape. As you can see, the fact that there's a new sub-level only affects the part where that sub-level is.

The actual first output that I got with the hierarchy.

In the next images, I start playing with colors inside the cells. Naturally, all of these images where made from random point distribution.

In these images, I simply played with the hierarchy. Each cell has a random chance to get a sub-level and so on. Until a maximal depth was reached. In some of them, I played also with the feature that at each level, you can influence the final color by accumulating a value.

Finally, there's two big step to do before we consider that project finished. First, we want to investigate various patterns. So, how can we do a particular shape for a cell. For this part, we don't need the hierarchy because we know it works. When we are able to control properly the patterns, we will be able to used them at various level.

Second, we want to be more dynamic for the color. Right now, each cell use a function f:[0;1]->[0;1] to control its value that will influence all the other levels. But those functions are a bit static. I can add more, but it will never be enough. So we turn to use something like the shaders in OpenGL. Literally, each cell could have its own function (coded in CUDA-C) and that function would be used to control the contribution of that cell and its sub-level to the final color of the pixel.