A Generic Interface to Colors, Materials, and Textures Inproceedings

Abstract:

Material models predict the reflection of light by surfaces in a scene. Many models have been proposed, all with different scope of effects and different parameters. The same holds for color models and texture definitions. Most computer graphics systems implement only one model with a minimal interface. If a different model is to be integrated this interface needs to be restructured which results in many code changes in the whole system.
This work presents a new approach to a generic interface to colors and materials. By enumerating all possible operations on these graphics objects an interface for reusable and portable code is defined. A seamless integration of textured surfaces into a computer graphics system is made possible by generic texture trees which implement the generic material interface. This portable definition of textures is realized via a tree of texture nodes and texture generators.