PolyCube-maps

Standard texture mapping of real-world meshes suffers from the presence of seams that need to be introduced in order to avoid excessive distortions and to make the topology of the mesh compatible to the one of the texture domain. In contrast, cube maps provide a mechanism that could be used for seamless texture mapping with low distortion, but only if the object roughly resembles a cube. We extend this concept to arbitrary meshes by using as texture domain the surface of a polycube whose shape is similar to that of the given mesh. Our approach leads to a seamless texture mapping method that is simple enough to be implemented in currently available graphics hardware. Copyright © 2004 ACM.