Procedural Texturing of Solid Wood with Knots

Maria Larsson, Takashi Ijiri, Hironori Yoshida, Johannes A. J. Huber, Magnus Fredriksson, Olof Broman, and Takeo Igarashi

SIGGRAPH 2022 / ACM Transactions on Graphics

Procedural Knots Title Image

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Abstract

We present a procedural framework for modeling the annual ring pattern of solid wood with knots. Although wood texturing is a well-studied topic, there have been few previous attempts at modeling knots inside the wood texture. Our method takes the skeletal structure of a tree log as input and produces a three-dimensional scalar field representing the time of added growth, which defines the volumetric annual ring pattern. First, separate fields are computed around each strand of the skeleton, i.e., the stem and each knot. The strands are then merged into a single field using smooth minimums. We further suggest techniques for controlling the smooth minimum to adjust the balance of smoothness and reproduce the distortion effects observed around dead knots. Our method is implemented as a shader program running on a GPU with computation times of approximately 0.5 s per image and an input data size of 600 KB. We present rendered images of solid wood from pine and spruce as well as plywood and cross-laminated timber (CLT). Our results were evaluated by wood experts, who confirmed the plausibility of the rendered annual ring patterns.

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  • Authors

    Maria Larsson, The University of Tokyo
    Takashi Ijiri, Shibaura Institute of Technology
    Hironori Yoshida, Future University Hakodate
    Johannes A. J. Huber, Luleå University of Technology
    Magnus Fredriksson, Luleå University of Technology
    Olof Broman, Luleå University of Technology
    Takeo Igarashi, The University of Tokyo

    Reference

    Maria Larsson, Takashi Ijiri, Hironori Yoshida, Johannes A. J. Huber, Magnus Fredriksson, Olof Broman, Takeo Igarashi. Procedural Texturing of Solid Wood with Knots. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 41(4), July 2022.