Section: New Results

Procedural Phasor Noise

Participants : Thibault Tricard, Semyon Efremov, Cédric Zanni, Fabrice Neyret, Jonàs Martínez, Sylvain Lefebvre.

Procedural pattern synthesis is a fundamental tool of Computer Graphics. In 2019 we introduced a new formulation that generates a wide range of patterns that could not be produced by other techniques. Our procedural phasor noise is based on a prior technique called Gabor noise, which creates oscillating patterns with accurate control over their frequency content (power spectrum). Gabor noise achieves this by summing a large number of Gabor kernels — Gaussian weighted sinewaves — distributed pseudo-randomly in space. Unfortunately Gabor noise suffers from local loss of contrast and lacks control over the shape of the oscillations (which always have a sinewave profile).

Our method solves these limitations by reformulating Gabor noise to expose its instantaneous phase. Once the phase obtained we can directly remap a periodic profile function onto it, to obtain an oscillating pattern of constant contrast and controlled profile geometry, while retaining all desirable properties of Gabor noise (see Figure 3). This unlocks two main applications. The first is in texture synthesis for computer graphics, to generate color, displacement and normal fields. The second is in additive manufacturing, where our method can be applied in 3D to generate a wide range of microstructures.

This work was done in collaboration with Fabrice Neyret (MAVERICK, Inria) and has been published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, in 2019 [17]. Thibault Tricard and Semyon Efremov did a joint presentation at ACM SIGGRAPH 2019.

Figure 3. Phasor noise is a novel procedural function generating strongly oriented, coherent stripe patterns. The profiles of the oscillations are controlled (here: square, triangular, sine).